A Letter from Marjan Kamali

In 2019, a few months after my novel The Stationery Shop was published, I started writing the story of four mothers from different backgrounds in suburban New England experiencing the fear and excitement of their firstborns going off to college. But a minor character in the story, a certain Miss Ellie who owned a café, kept bubbling to the surface. So compelling was this minor elderly Iranian character to me that I chucked the 125 pages I had already written about the other moms and started over entirely to tell the tale of Ellie and her friend, Homa, an indefatigable Iranian women’s rights activist.

 

Writing about Iranian women has been a central theme of my life. I come from a line of strong, very vocal, and opinionated Iranian women who in some instances broke new ground (my grandmother was one of the first full-time career women in Iran in the 1940s), in other instances saw their lives stymied and constrained by a patriarchal culture, and in all cases experienced a hard-line government eradicate almost overnight rights for which women had fought for decades.

 

In my first novel, Together Tea, I follow the story of a girl whose childhood is upended by revolution and the war that followed and whose mother is fiercely trying to hold on to a life and dignity that oppressive forces are determined to crush. In my second novel, The Stationery Shop, I went back further in Iran’s history to follow the story of a bookish young woman who falls in love during the time of the 1953 coup d’état in Iran and whose life is forever shaped by that love from which she can never recover. And in this third novel, I follow the friendship between two girls who come from very different families and stations in life but who forge an indestructible bond when they are seven. Together they share the joys of childhood, the ups and downs of adolescence, the fractures of betrayal when they are young women, and the relief of redemption as their fate takes them across oceans and borders. All along, one of them, Homa, fights tirelessly for Iranian women to be free.

 

I started writing this book in 2019 and continued through the snowy winter of Boston into 2020. While the world shut down during the pandemic, my heart opened up to these two girls. I continued writing through the following year and the next, and I was more than halfway done with the story of Ellie and Homa when a young woman in Iran named Mahsa Jina Amini was killed by security forces in September 2022 for wearing improper hijab. Like many Iranians in the diaspora, I was filled with hope and heartbreak as women and girls took to the streets after that incident because they had had enough. Enough of being controlled. Enough of being held down. Enough of having what they wore, what they said, and who they loved dictated by those who did not value their vibrancy, talents, skills, or dreams. I watched as the women and men of Iran rose up to fight for freedom and were quashed by security forces. As I finished this book, Iran’s long quest for freedom and tragic cycle of protests and crackdowns happened in real time.

 

I am neither a scholar nor a historian and I do not pretend to have written a book about the entire history of the women’s movement in Iran. But I am a novelist and I know the power of story. For as long as they have lived, Iranian women have known that power. It was with story that Scheherazade kept herself alive, and it is through story (both the reading and the writing of it) that so many of us find solace, refuge, hope, and understanding. With my pen I hope to show you, dear reader, the joys and losses and loves and hopes and dreams and worries of two girls from Iran. I made them up, but they are real to me. I hope you enjoy their journey. I hope in their hopes, you see some of yours. I hope from their tale, you sense that all our hearts are one.