Poetry has long been the language of lovers, and in Parisa Akhbari’s debut novel Just Another Epic Love Poem, it acts as the foundation fo two best friends on the verge of becoming something more. High school senior Mitra Esfahani has everything under control as long as her best friend Bea is by her side. Even while struggling with the absence of her mother due to addiction and walking the social tightrope of being queer in Catholic school, what keeps Mitra afloat is the shared journal of poetry passed between herself and Bea. But when Mitra’s mother makes an appearance, claiming to be sober and ready to be a part of Mitra’s life again, and things with Bea turn romantic, Mitra grapples with all the sudden changes in her relationships. Akhbari, who is also a mental health therapist, spoke with PW about her evolving relationship to poetry, the challenges of being vulnerable, and her own shared journal that served as inspiration for her novel.
What was the initial spark for this book?
When I was in high school, I had a best friend who was a year younger than me. We had classes together and after school we spent all this time together. We would be talking, texting, and writing notes, writing each other letters, all the ways that young people connect. And as I was preparing to head off [to college], I was wondering what our friendship would look like and how we would stay connected as our lives changed. I got us this big journal, and I put some photos of us in it, and I wrote her a letter inside. We started passing it back and forth. At first, I thought it was just going to be this fun way for us to share some of the written communication that we had in high school, but it ended up becoming this tether to keep us grounded. That was probably 17 or 18 years ago, and we still have a journal that we pass back and forth.
One of the things I recognized through that experience is that it became a place where we could talk about some of the harder things in our lives. It’s not just for fun photos and memories and inside jokes, but also talking about the things that maybe is hard to verbalize or say aloud. I wanted to imagine how two teens who are trying to survive an environment like Catholic school might create their own world through this written poem that they exchange, and how that might be the vehicle for them to express things that feel inexpressible.
The title Just Another Epic Love Poem references the idea of poems about romance and love. Why was poetry the language you wanted Mitra and Bea to use with one another?
When I was growing up, at school, I felt like poetry was inaccessible—that it was this language used by old dead white guys. A lot of the poetry I read, I felt like I just couldn’t relate to it. It also seemed like there were a lot of rules and constraints over what poetry should or could be. You read poetry that follows certain forms, and Western ideas of literature. I just couldn’t connect to that. But when I started reading Hafez, and when I started reading other Iranian poets and other brown poets and women poets, I started to see that poetry was something that could become a vehicle of expression for me—that I could break out of some of the constraints that I imagined.
Another [aspect] for me is that I have a disability that affects my joints. I stopped being able to write by hand very much when I was in my early 20s. I used to do a lot of longform writing, essays and things like that. I started to realize if I wanted to write by hand, I had to be very concise and thoughtful about my word choice, because I can’t do very much. And poetry was the answer. I started to think about each word that I would use with a lot of intention. That was a lovely way to get to the heart of what I wanted to express in a very short form.
Did your work as a therapist come into play in writing this novel, particularly in navigating Mitra’s experience as a daughter of someone with an addiction?
As a therapist, I have some parallels to my experience with writing in that I spend a lot of time trying to understand the way that people make meaning out of their experiences and out of their lives. I also get to understand the way that we conceal our emotional experience for the sake of protecting ourselves. Ultimately, we have to make a decision about whether or not it’s worthwhile to be vulnerable, and to open up to connection, but then to risk being hurt. That’s a theme that I noticed a lot in the work that I do. It’s also a theme that Mitra is grappling with throughout the book, [because] she had experienced a lot of harm and abandonment from her mother. She’s at this moment in her life where she has an opportunity to reconnect with her mother while she also is falling in love for the first time. In both of those relationships she’s trying to understand whether it’s worthwhile to take a risk to connect or to be vulnerable and to allow somebody into your heart when the possibility is that they could reject you, they could abandon you, they could devastate you. Hopefully young people can relate to the overall thematic elements even if they can’t relate to the specifics of having a parent with an addiction. I think so many young people are trying to understand whether a relationship is worth the risk that it involves emotionally.
You described connection and love as a risk. To you, is that gamble worth it?
That is a question that I have so many conversations about in my practice. Part of my job as a therapist is to reflect the other person’s experience and not to come in with my own opinions or my own agenda. My hope for Mitra was to open her shell and to see that even if loss is the result of vulnerability, even if she experiences rejection or betrayal, the experience of love and connection of being seen and known by somebody else on a deep level is worth it even when it comes with grief. I hope that’s a place that she might come to through the course of the novel. I know that’s a place I’ve come to in my own life through my own experiences of love and loss and hard heartache and all of those things. At the end of the day, I’m grateful for the opportunities that I’ve had to feel seen and understood by other people. In writing, there’s a parallel that I hope to be seen and understood through the stories that I tell, even though it’s a vulnerability to put them out there.
Just Another Epic Love Poem by Parisa Akhbari. Dial, Mar. 12 $19.99 ISBN 978-0-593-53049-8.
