Isak Interview #4: Elizabeth Eslami (With Video)

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It is difficult these days to so much as utter the word “Iran” without evoking stories of politics, policy, and protest. Overshadowed, it seems, are the people. For Elizabeth Eslami, fiction is a way to center the lives of first and second-generation Iranian immigrants in the United States who are too often the subject of stories told about them, rather than by them.

Eslami’s debut novel, Bone Worship, hinges on how the mysteries of the past bear on our discovery of the future. We meet Jasmine Fahroodhi, a brilliant and isolated zoology student at the University of Chicago who suddenly fails out of school her senior year. She returns home to her parents in small-town Georgia, and finds that both her father – an Iranian immigrant – and her mother (a 911 operator) are preparing to arrange her marriage. As Jasmine vacillates between resistance and intrigue at the idea of pending marriage, she turns inward – gathering scraps of information from her father’s mysterious past, imagining them in full-hearted stories, and discovering the power of not only what has come before, but of herself. Bone Worship's book trailer offers another take:

Like Jasmine, Elizabeth Eslami is an Iranian-American who grew up in the American south. She studied writing at Sarah Lawrence Collage and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in Bat City Review, The Minnesota Review, The Millions, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. These days, in the wake of this year's publication of Bone Worship, Elizabeth is wrapping up a story collection called It Is All Getting Away From Us and is halfway through a novel set in Montana in the early 1900s that is about— of all things—a wolf exterminator.

Recently, I was able to connect with Elizabeth to discuss her childhood habit of hiding stories, how Iranian politics influences fiction, the gender gap of readers, airports, the best lesson she learned from the publication process, and the state of the modern arranged marriage.

Here's Elizabeth:

Elizabeth, how did you come to center writing in your life?

As far back as I can recall, I loved hearing and telling stories. The Brothers Grimm stories in particular fascinated me, and later the Anne of Green Gables books and Nancy Drew mysteries. I must have realized early on how powerful storytelling is because I was so secretive about it. I wrote stories and folded them into tiny squares of paper and hid them in metal band-aid containers and shoeboxes. I was also enamored of books as objects, so I made flip books and I illustrated my stories. I think what I was really doing though was learning how to observe. There was a kind of purity in that part of the process, just looking closely, even minutely at the world, before you have to learn how to convey what you see (and how you see it) to a reader.

I was lucky to have teachers throughout grade school, high school, and college who encouraged me as a writer. In a very basic way they validated my talent by telling me I was good at writing, and I trusted them. I’m not sure I would have believed in myself as someone who could one day have a career as a writer without that early support. For good or bad, I wasn’t someone who tried on a lot of different hats and wandered my way into writing. I was pulled toward it, more than anything, because I was a reader. I would fall in love with a story like Sherwood Anderson’s “Death in the Woods,” and I was fully ready to commit my life to trying to write something that beautiful.

Whether it’s election protests or nuclear proliferation, Iran dominates our current political conversation. How does fiction by and about Iranian-Americans expand on this? Or rather, do you feel that news coverage of Iran limits the perception of fiction like yours?

I struggle with this because in many ways it’s a positive thing that Iran is getting so much play in the media, even if it is often for such unfortunate reasons. I say this because there was a time, not so much for me because I’m in my thirties, but for other Iranian-American writers, when nobody in America seemed to know where Iran was on a map, let alone about its political situation. I suppose one could argue that American interest in Iran has been borne of our own self-centered concerns, how Iran does or could affect us.

But it seems like last summer’s election protests were something different. There was a genuine interest in what was happening with Mousavi’s Green Movement and public outrage over Neda Agha-Soltan’s death. I was amazed to go on Twitter and see how many writers had changed their location to “Tehran” in solidarity with Iranians.

The conundrum for Iranian-American fiction writers or those writing about Iranian-Americans is how to deal with Iran’s politically charged environment. Frankly, there is an expectation (by many American readers) that they must deal with it, which is not necessarily something I agree with. The United States undergoes constant political upheaval – albeit in a less high stakes way – and yet no one thinks anything of an American novel that does not address what’s happening with the current administration, Congress, or the parties. There are millions of stories that need to be told about Iran, and many of these do not necessitate an overt or even oblique handling of Iranian politics in order to be told and told well. As writers, we create problems for ourselves when we start with agendas, however important they may be to us, at the expense of character and story.

Also, there’s the tendency for Americans to view fiction set in Iran as something that should be serious in tone. Certainly there are many wonderful novels by Iranian-American writers that are serious, but there are also comedic works, such as Firoozeh Dumas’s memoir Funny in Farsi. Persis Karim’s lovely anthology Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been is full of tonally rich and tonally disparate writing by Iranians and Iranian-Americans. Though my novel is largely set in America and concerns an Iranian immigrant and his American daughter, I wanted to avoid the trap of having it be a “heavy” book. It is serious in its treatment of a young woman’s search for her cultural identity, but it’s also funny and light-hearted. Iranians are no different from Americans in their range of emotions. Perhaps that seems an obvious point to make, but when Americans only view images of angry Iranians on their television screens, it is unfortunately a point that has to be made.

In Bone Worship, Jasmine is caught up in the mystery of her father; because he is not forthcoming with the stories of his past in Iran, she makes them up – writing tales built out of the few details knows about him. As a novel writer yourself, do you see a truth that fiction holds about places and people that might seem strange to us – a truth that nonfiction doesn’t quite reach?

I’m fascinated by this tension between fiction and nonfiction, and what each can do in terms of revealing a truth. This is such an interesting time because you not only have the surging popularity of memoir (and the controversy over David Shields’s Reality Hunger and Ben Yagoda’s book on memoir), you also have huge figures like Philip Roth coming out with claims that the novel is dead. Obviously as a novelist and as a reader of novels, I will never accept that the novel is dead – or ailing, for that matter. I do think something is happening, some kind of hybridity, in which the lines are getting blurred in wild ways, and that’s fine. The fact that new life forms are springing up is, at least to me, a sign that the novel is as healthy as ever. And Paul Auster arguing against that.

What I find puzzling and alarming is the idea of novels being intended for a certain audience. On my book tour, I’m always passing in and out of airport bookstores, and one can’t help but notice a gender gap. I almost never see men standing in front of the fiction section. Invariably, men gravitate toward the nonfiction and woman toward both or toward fiction. Obviously I’m not saying that men have stopped reading novels, but I do think airport bookstores present a litmus test for what many people are reading.

Another thing is how often at readings I’m asked if the book is autobiographical. Of course this is a standard question, but there is something different about the way it is asked of me lately. There is a hunger to this question, a disappointment for the story not to be “true.” As if fiction has suddenly become a lesser art.

For me, fiction offers a freedom from self-consciousness. When I’m writing a novel or a short story, my writerly self evaporates. Fiction offers a little extra space in the narrative for the reader to squeeze right in, with room to accommodate what the reader brings to the story. Nonfiction feels more closed and complete. It’s the difference between having the audience come up on stage where they can bump into the furniture versus the audience staying put in their seats, the furniture on stage carefully nailed down in its proper place. I love nonfiction – these days I’ve been writing more nonfiction than anything else – but when I write it, I still have to create a persona for myself that is somewhat different from me. Without it, I’ve got my face pressed into a mirror instead of looking into it.

I don’t believe one offers a more expeditious way to the truth; rather, I think the story itself, and the author’s choice of how to engage the reader, heralds the way to that truth.

Jasmine’s father wants to arrange a marriage for her after the top student suddenly fails out of the University of Chicago. You bring nuance to the story with Jasmine feeling both resistant and intrigued by idea of a marriage being arranged for her. What is your experience with arranged marriages, and how do you think they do or do not fit in modern society?

I personally don’t have any experience with arranged marriage except the decision to use it in this novel and the subsequent research that went into it. What intrigued me was that so many Americans think that most or all marriages in the Middle East are arranged, when in fact this is not true. In Iran, though it still happens in some rural areas or among particularly religious or traditional families, it is quite rare.

However, arranged marriage is more prevalent than I thought in the U.S. We may think of it as backward, but the way it takes place in America now is not very different from our own matchmaking websites. What you find is that some of these children of immigrants have tried modern ways of dating only to become disenchanted with the process, coming back to their parents for guidance. Arranged marriage websites exist to provide a large pool of eligible mates of various nationalities and with different religious beliefs, or none at all, but principally to match people based on all the usual issues of compatibility: career, personality, desires, and so on. And though parents can suggest their top candidates, the children have veto power. In this way, arranged marriage does not seem all that antiquated.

I have no urge to defend or condemn arranged marriage and its place in modern society. That said, I doubt arranged marriage will ever disappear.In the end, I think we are all lucky to find mates however we can find them. If we want them!

You’re a debut author. What have you learned from the publication of Bone Worship? What are you hearing about how you are connecting to readers?

I’ve learned that the publication process is a glacially slow, strange, and often maddening journey, and that everyone with a published book is ridiculously fortunate. There are about a million different ways for the entire thing to fall apart. The most you can hope for is that your book will mean something to someone, that you will meet other writers whom you admire along the way, and that you can look back at your work and tell yourself with honesty and compassion, “Hey, it’s not perfect, but there are moments when I very nearly reached my level of perfection at that time in my life.” The best thing I’ve learned – and this has touched me deeply – is that although we can be competitive, writers love other writers, and we will champion each other like no one else can.

I continue to be stunned when I’m contacted by people who love the book. It’s so encouraging to me that readers will go into a bookstore and pick up a novel by someone they have never heard of. I’m shocked when someone forty years older than Jasmine Fahroodhi comes up to me at a reading with tears in her eyes and says she loved her story, and then the next day I get a message from a twenty-something who says she loved it because she’s just like Jasmine. And it’s interesting to see what has resonated with different people, those who read it and sob, thinking of their parents, and those who tell me they couldn’t stop laughing.

So many people have found the book on their own in bookstores, but I’ve also had people come to it because they read my nonfiction and other writing published online. My Blogspot blog, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and Red Room have all developed my audience in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Authors sometimes complain about the time it takes to blog and post their work, which is certainly valid, but it seems pretty amazing to me that you can bring readers to your book simply based on the strength of your writing. I mean, in a world of politics and hype, isn’t that refreshing?

Selected Articles by Elizabeth Eslami: