Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
#215 - Sanam Mahloudji
77 Plays53 minutes ago
Contemporary fiction writer, Sanam Mahloudji joins us to chat about her debut novel, The Persians, the ups and downs of her publication journey and how her personal experiences influenced the novel.
💖 Join the Patreon 🙏
Support the show and get access to the extended episodes and more!
📚 The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes 🥳
Jamie, Melissa and Noami talk about all things writing, tropes and publishing!
✍️ WriteMentor 🧑🏫
Get a whole month with WriteMentor's Hub for free using the coupon code 'Write&Wrong'.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Writing Challenges
00:00:00
Speaker
Ooh, a spicy question. I love it. Because the writing is sort of everything, right? Like, you could've, can fix plot holes, but if the writing... So some readers love that and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this. So it's kind of, it's kind of a gamble.
Welcoming Sanam Malaji
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast on today's episode. I am joined by an award-winning short story writer whose debut novel, The Persians, is out in the UK right now and will be out in the US in March.
00:00:28
Speaker
It's Sanam Malaji. Hello, welcome. Hi, thank you so much for having me. Thanks for coming on. Great to chat with you.
Overview of 'The Persians'
00:00:38
Speaker
Let's dive right in with the novel. um Tell us a little bit about your debut novel, The Persians. Okay, fantastic. So yes, my novel, The Persians, it's about an Iranian family. um It's about a family that are split by revolution.
00:00:54
Speaker
Half of the members are in the United States at this point, and the book starts in the year 2005, the very end of 2005. Half of them are in the United States and the other half are in Iran. And um it's about a family that was once great.
00:01:11
Speaker
They come from a um ah family who, ah there there's a there's an ancestor named the great that I named the Great Warrior. And he was someone that had a really significant place in Iranian history. um But at this point in time, they are really diminished. And in many ways, the book is about a family who is grappling with a great kind of loss and decline. And I think that um and a way that there is something inherently sad of course about writing about a book about loss and decline and something even kind of pathetic about it but also something funny and um although the the aspect of a family that was once great isn't entirely universal I think there's something very human and universal about loss and um it's about the failures that are
00:02:03
Speaker
out of your control and that how those failures often lead to failures that are in your control.
Introducing Key Characters
00:02:09
Speaker
um So the story is about five women in a family and there's the matriarch Elizabeth. She's the grandmother and she's a bit haughty um because she you know grew up in this really privileged family. But underneath it, she's really quite radical. She had this love affair when she was much younger that crossed class lines and that continues to affect her in the present. But the the story, the novel, really opens with Shereen, who is a character that I call Auntie Shereen, and she's elizabeth's she's one of Elizabeth's three children. She's her daughter. She lives in Houston in 2005, and she's a high-flying event planner. She's very flamboyant. She has a lot of opinions about everything.
00:02:50
Speaker
you know She's constantly testing everyone. she's She's very challenging and she's the very first instant of the book. She's arrested for, it's the aftermath of actually her arrest for attempted prostitution when on a family vacation in Aspen. And she's there with her niece, Bita, who's a 20 something year old law student who bails her out of jail. And Bita's sort of the voice of reason in in in between the two of them, but she's really going through her own stuff um herself. and One is, um I think, living in the shadow of this family and women like Shereen, who's so outspoken, and as well as her grandmother, Elizabeth. and And one of the things she's dealing with is who does she want to be in life? There's also Bita's mother, Sima. She's someone who died a year earlier from cancer. And I don't want to give too much away, but we
00:03:43
Speaker
hear about her story from the grave. And and then there is finally, there's Nias, who's Shireen's daughter, who didn't leave for America with Shireen, but instead was was raised by Elizabeth the grandmother.
Themes of the Novel
00:03:57
Speaker
And so um the story starts with Shireen's act of of getting arrested, and it's something that forces, that plunges his family in having to reckon with themselves.
00:04:07
Speaker
And all the while because she's very dramatic and flamboyant, she's unrepentant about this arrest. And she has this crazy idea that she's going to repair the family name. And she decides to go to New York and she becomes roommates with Bita. It's kind of like an odd couple pairing. And that's a lot of where the action of the book in the present day happens. There was a um recent Guardian review of it where the the critic described shereen as someone who's making performance art out of a midlife crisis and i love that description of it because i thought that really captures so some part of her personality but overall i think the heart of my novel is about the relationship between these women and their relationships to themselves
00:04:54
Speaker
to their family and I say that I don't see it, although it goes back and forth in time, I don't i don't really see it as a as a quote unquote historical novel um because it's not a novel that I set out. i didn't write I didn't set out to write sort of a historically accurate novel of Iranian history and so I think that um you know If someone's reading this book to learn about Iranian history, I think they'd be um disappointed. But I see it as ah a story of a family and really about how um how we as individuals can see ourselves and our families in histories and how
00:05:30
Speaker
It's never really told in
Writing Fragmented Histories
00:05:32
Speaker
full. I mean, I grew up in a family myself that was very secretive about about things and didn't really like talking about the past. And I think that happens a lot when you grow up in with a lot of traumas. um And so i I was telling this story as something very fractured and how and I think that's one reason why it has the five different points of view and where there's never a complete picture.
00:05:56
Speaker
but you're getting a sense of maybe how someone might, for example, like myself, might see might be able to construct a story about ah a family and a past with incomplete information where I think a lot of a lot of people these days who don't live in the country that their ancestors came from, that's kind of how we construct our are ourselves.
00:06:18
Speaker
And each of those, because you're doing it through five different characters, then presumably also you're doing it through five different lenses. So they're all going to tell a slightly different interpretation of the story. So all of the puzzle pieces don't quite match up.
00:06:31
Speaker
Exactly. And you don't really know, right. And some of the characters are more reliable than others. um And so, as a reader, I think you're trying to understand, well, what's the real story here? Is, um you know, are is this family really great? Did they, it was this ancestor actually really, was he all that he was, what what some of the characters claim that he was, or was he problematic? For example, was Nia is the the daughter who was left in, um was left in Iran as a young girl, was she really, was she abandoned? um
00:07:08
Speaker
Everyone has their own kind of interpretation of it. And so I think that that made it a lot lot of fun to write, very challenging, but definitely um added to the sort of, um I guess the layers
Inspiration Behind the Novel
00:07:21
Speaker
of it. And I think that having all these layers kind of made it feel like you're really getting, I was hoping to kind of really come put across the way I think a family is in in all these little layers and pieces and stories and conflicts.
00:07:40
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds like a lot of this and and ah so just to state for the record that this is fiction. This is all fiction, but it does. It sounds like a lot of this. It does come out from yeah ah your own experiences.
00:07:57
Speaker
I wanted to add also that the one of the the sparks for writing the book was to think about family like this and think about what was the worst possible thing that could happen to a family such as this, a family that were somebodies in Iran but nobodies in America. and um and in Shireen's case, she thinks there's still something special. you know and And I think even from the beginning, I had a hunch that perhaps that worst thing maybe isn't the worst thing and it might actually be the best thing for for this family. But yes, to say that the um you know i don't I don't have a family who was
00:08:34
Speaker
who had a member who was arrested for attempted prostitution or anything like that. um but but so that and There isn't an auntie sharing in my life, um but there are definitely aspects of it that, you know of course, this is my first novel.
From Short Stories to Novels
00:08:50
Speaker
and It did feel at some point that it was the book that I had to write. And and I think that, um and maybe that's the way it is for a lot of first novels, but I was writing short stories from 2010.
00:09:06
Speaker
And that's how I started writing fiction as an adult. And I never in my mind had this idea of, oh, i but I want to be a novelist. It was always, um no, I like writing. I like words. I like reading. And um and writing short stories gave me the the opportunity and the pleasure and challenge of really looking at a story in a very minute way and really focusing on, you know, maybe I'd have 10 to 15 pages to to express something, to write about something.
00:09:34
Speaker
It wasn't really until I um i started writing. a story called Auntie Shirin, which is the basically in an edited form, the first chapter of this book that I had actually started grappling with something that was closer to family and maybe my own personal experience in a certain way. Before that, I hadn't written about Iranian characters really. I i grew up in America and um and I spent most of my life actually more trying to fit in. and
00:10:09
Speaker
and not call attention to my difference as an Iranian and and so and and not consciously but you know when I was writing fiction that being Iranian wasn't
Impact of Socio-political Events
00:10:20
Speaker
the for thing in my mind and so instead i there would be a say a line of dialogue or a particular character or something that would motivate me to start writing a story. And um that's kind of how I operated for many years. But something happened in 2000, and what was it? two thousand Well, 2017, or the very beginning of 2017, where I um
00:10:49
Speaker
Started writing the story and many things were happening in the world at the time Trump had just become president for the very first time which I mean, yeah or a and Yeah, um and Here we are again. Here we are again never and I guess I guess this was more predictable but at the time I was feeling a real anger in America it was kind of like I grew up in this place and I Everything that I thought I knew about it didn't really exist. And suddenly there were there was something called the Muslim ban, and Trump had banned people from my own country from entering America. And I volunteered at LAX. I spoke with people who were landing from Tehran, and some of them had been separated from other members of their families or had had long word deals of of sitting in um in in
00:11:46
Speaker
kind of confined to rooms being questioned, having their phones taken away, having their belongings looked through. and and And at the time, I remember feeling hesitant to even do that because i my Persian is not perfect. And I you know grew up in a family where I would maybe, even if I were spoken to in Farsi, I would answer in English. so It wasn't, um I felt like I was in inauthentic in a way, but it was really this experience of of seeing that no matter what, no matter how long I had spent in America, that but still to some people, to Trump, to his followers, that I was i was still other and I was still not and entirely welcome.
00:12:30
Speaker
And so I started, I guess I was feeling more Iranian and I was feeling angry. And I um i also, and it and and I guess related to this idea of feeling authentic, um I let go of that idea that I needed to be a certain kind of Iranian to write about Iranians.
Authenticity in Representation
00:12:50
Speaker
So I let go of that. And I also had this idea in my head that ah story about Iranians had to be so a certain kind of way. Like I had this, first I had this kind of feeling of, well, if I represent Iranians, I have this pressure of representing them in a positive light. um I let go of that. And then I also had this idea that from what I'd seen before in fiction or in movies that either Iranians, I had to write a tale that was very flowery and sentimental and poetic. And, you know, I had to quote Rumi and
00:13:22
Speaker
and it had to feature pomegranates and saffron, and I had no interest interested in doing that. and and then i also And then I'd seen stories of of terrorists, of hijackers, and also stories of um where where the real focus was the the oppression of the Islamic Republic. And I really felt like in my heart that I wanted to tell something different, and I think I started ah giving myself permission to doing that. and I also had children about that time or a few years before that. And I think maybe I was thinking about history a lot more. And yeah, I think all these things kind of came together and I started that story and that's basically... And here we are. Yeah, that's... I mean, at that point, it was still a short story for a few years. I
00:14:15
Speaker
It got published in McSweeney's Quarterly in the States. And at that point I still had an idea that I was going to turn it into a novel and I was still working on short stories. But at some point it was kind of like that thing that I couldn't get out of my head. It was kind of, it kept coming back to me and I felt like I wasn't done with these people that I still had a lot more to say.
00:14:35
Speaker
So had you is writing a ah novel, a sort of long-form manuscript, is that something you'd always wanted to do or was it something that you kind of, like you said, this so short story just stuck with you and you were like, no, I think I have to try and find, there's more here to write?
Development of 'The Persians'
00:14:50
Speaker
Yeah, no, I didn't i i didn't have in my head that I, well, i you know I had been writing short stories and I think that I um Maybe part of it is that I, I didn't let myself imagine that I could write a novel. I think that I in part tricked myself into writing a novel. One of the other reasons that it, that it is told in five points of view is that it really started as me writing individual short stories from the perspectives of the various characters. So I, ah well, what is, what's Elizabeth up to? What's her deal? Like, why is she, what what is, I have a little nugget in there.
00:15:27
Speaker
in the in the first short story about her and and what you see in the first chapter. And I thought, well, what what what's her story? And I kind of, and I did that with the other characters where I i think the only character that's not in the in in the first chapter is Niaz, but really it was about was about kind of who are the cast cast of characters and who are the the people that um the people whose stories I need to tell about this family. And at first, actually, I had um the a few of the men in the the story were more prominent. And I had um kind of storylines that involved Mo, who's Shereen's son, and who met her husband. and
00:16:12
Speaker
I went in various directions in the very in the early stages of of writing the book that then I would put aside. But yeah, the the way that I wrote the book was really at first writing individual stories and I, because I'd never done this before, I kind of structured it at first where I would go from, it would be one, two, three, four, five for the five characters and then I'd repeat them again and then repeat them again.
00:16:37
Speaker
and and on and on, and I thought I would do that until I got to an end. And then I found out, I think maybe halfway through that I couldn't really stick to that um structure entirely, that that it wasn't wanting, the book wasn't wanting to be written that way. And that's where I think things started moving around. and i had I had, in order to write the book, I had someone who told me about the program Scrivener. So I had done that and that made it a lot easier to kind of have these different chapters and to to move them around and play with them. But slowly I started to see a kind of an arc and slowly it started to feel like this was really not individual short stories that I'm, I mean, i'm that I'm telling a novel. I'm i'm writing a novel.
00:17:27
Speaker
That's yeah, that's really cool. And it makes sense. Um, cause I was going to say for a first novel, you took on a lot by having not only multiple point of view characters, but multiple timelines. Uh, but then when you put it in the context of how you kind of built it, what it came from, it makes all the sense in the world. But of course you would have different points of view and timelines. Cause originally it was sort of a sort of different stories around the same kind of narrative.
00:17:53
Speaker
Yes, exactly. um Yeah. Sometimes when I was writing it, I thought, what am I doing? Like, how did I, why am I, I mean, I could have just had one point of view, one timeline, like written, you know, a story ah about something that happens in the course of a a week maybe. oh But I don't think that that was, I think that that wasn't the book that I needed to write. So I think this was what I, it was what I had to write.
Current and Future Writing Projects
00:18:21
Speaker
Yeah. Um, Amara in guessing that you're probably writing something new, you're working on something new at this point. I am. I mean, not at the very moment, but, um, I mean, I have to say the publication, like the, the last few months, I mean, it's been very exciting, but also I find anxiety inducing. Um, and so just kind of, I think just coping with, uh,
00:18:47
Speaker
the things that, just the stresses of it, I think have been, I think more than enough for me. um Yeah, you're not alone. I've many, I think a lot of authors feel the same way, especially with the debut novel, because it's all new and you're not, you don't know what to expect and things like that. um Well, my question was actually going to be, yeah ah with the with your new novel, yeah are you writing it in the same way as in like, is it starting out with a short story here, a short story there that will kind of connect?
00:19:16
Speaker
Um, I don't think so. I think that, I mean, so I, so what I think that my new novel is, is that I, there's a story and, and I think I'm i'm learning this about myself as I go along, of course, is that, uh, like I was saying about the Persians, how it seemed like it was sort of, I had no choice and it was something that I, that I had to write. It was like a thing that I had to get out of me. Um,
00:19:43
Speaker
And that was sort of why it had to be a novel, that it wasn't just a short story. I think that that is sort, there's a story that I think that I need to tell. And it also has some basis in my life. And it's something that feels very, I guess it feels very formative to who I am and who I am as a writer is that In 2010, my father died from acute alcohol intoxication and um it was that he died the day after
00:20:20
Speaker
It was the day before my second ever writing class and um as an adult, and I went to that
Personal Loss and Storytelling
00:20:28
Speaker
class. um i wrote I remember, and I think I even tripped falling walking down the stairs and scraped my knee because I was so, I mean, I was obviously in a great state of shock and grief. but i But for me, writing fiction, and I say as an adult, because when I was a kid, I wrote fiction, but it wasn't something that I ever, I never thought that it was something that I could do for real, you know? Like it was not something that I thought, oh, I could grow up and be a writer. Like that wasn't ever something that, you know, I, not only had I not never seen anybody with a name like mine, writing fiction, I just,
00:21:14
Speaker
And I, but I also grew up in an immigrant family where I think the idea of security and stability and, you know, my job felt like, I mean, my role was do something that earns you proper money that stabilizes you and that, you know, and and being in the art would not be, you know, but so this is to say that um for my second book, I think that one, so I wrote a story,
00:21:43
Speaker
years ago. I think it was one of the first stories that I wrote. It's never been published, but it's about a woman who has recently, her dad has died. And I think in the story, he's overdosed on pills. And at the end of the story, and this sounds really sad and serious and it isn't a way, but it's also, I think, funny a funny story. And um she had kind of getting she starts hanging out with this group of, um I guess I would say they're a group of homeless people who um encourage her to rob a medical marijuana dispensary. And at the very end, she um stabs herself in the hand in front of the clerk at the dispensary. And um and and yet I think it is is funny still. And I think that
00:22:35
Speaker
I can't seem to shake the story, even though I wrote it so long ago and I keep going back to it. And I think that I need to write a story that that starts with that. And um I don't know where it'll go exactly, but I think that that's the start of it. And I think a father and daughter relationship and and and that kind of a grief or is ah an area that I need to explore in fiction.
00:23:01
Speaker
It sounds like you've got a really cool process for figuring out what which of your stories are the ones that could go to the distance, where it sounds like you you write a lot of short stories and then it's the ones that stay with you that you kind of know this is the one that that shit needs to grow. This is the one that where there's more to explore. Yeah, exactly. I think that that's... that's And I think maybe that's... um I think that's kind of happening organically like without without me necessarily ending that to be the case, but um they're the stories that I can't seem to shake. um
00:23:35
Speaker
Yeah, really cool. We are at the point in the episode where um I ship you off and maroon you and ask, ah Sanam, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book do you hope that it would be?
Influential Books
00:23:52
Speaker
Okay, I have to say, I hate this question. Yeah, you're not alone. A lot of people do.
00:23:59
Speaker
um Okay, so I have three books. okay i Can I share the three books? Yeah, that's right. And I think that they're all they're all books that I feel like they're very close to my heart for Various reasons because they're either when they were given to me or when I read them or what was going on in my life when I read them and also what they meant to what they've meant to me as a writer and I think each of them kind of um expands my my ideas of what a book can be so the first one is um
00:24:41
Speaker
is Jesus' Son by Dennis Johnson. um The second one is Stoner by John Williams. And um the third one is um Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector. And I can go... Of the three of them? yeah Yeah. I mean, do you have... Is there a hierarchy? Is there an order or are you kind of torn between all three? I mean, I think that...
00:25:11
Speaker
Dennis Johnson, I think for um when I read, and and that's, I guess, and I haven't read it in a little while, I have to say, but it's, I guess interlinked short, short stories interlinked. But I think when I read it, I thought,
00:25:27
Speaker
I've never seen anything like this before and how writing can be just absurd and poetic and beyond kind of what, I mean, that there's no limit to writing. And I think that that really mattered to me because I was, I actually, um before I started writing short stories, I was a lawyer. I mean, I was, I was practicing as a lawyer and, um and I think in a way it was kind of, um,
00:25:55
Speaker
maybe it helped me on my road to becoming a writer because I was for years having to write in a very kind of more rigid sort of way. And in writing fiction sort of, I mean, there is absolutely, there are no rules in fiction. And I mean, people try to tell you that there are rules, but I don't think there are. And so I think he's someone who reminds me that there are no rules. And I think, I think Stoner for the,
00:26:25
Speaker
You know, just the writing's not flashy. In a lot of ways it's very plain, but the kind of emotional resonance of of that book, I think really hit me strongly. um I read it, I think just right after my father had passed away. And I think, um I just feel very close to that book. And then, and then clear with Clarice Luspector, I, um yeah, I don't know if I can narrow it down. I tie that to my actually very first um writing teacher in high school.
00:26:56
Speaker
recommended her to me after um after reading some things that I was writing. And I think and i had actually held on to that book for years and years before I read it, but I remember reading it and thinking, wow, um what would I have been a different person if I'd read that back when I was 16 instead of 26? And so, yeah, all three of those books I think I need to take with me. um As a tiebreaker, I would suggest whichever one is the longest probably could, if you really needed a tiebreaker. Oh, and they're actually like Stoner's the longest. I think the other two are quite short. Um, okay. Yeah, but, but I don't know. know I think, but you don't want that one. i don't know if i Yeah, no that's a good point. I don't think I want that one. I think maybe, maybe it would have to be ah Jesus's son.
00:27:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe because it kind of just opens. It's so um I guess there's I guess I like the limitlessness of it, even even though that it's. so um Yeah.
00:28:09
Speaker
Okay, perfect. There we go. we we We narrowed it down. We figured it out. But there were two honorable mentions, so yeah we got we got a nice three in there. um Next up, we are going to chat a bit about Sanam's publishing journey from getting an agent to the five-way auction that this book ended
Closing Remarks and Contact Info
00:28:27
Speaker
up in. ah That will all be available in the extended episode, which you can find on Patreon. I just feel really lucky to kind of get to do that with my life.
00:28:39
Speaker
Yes, definitely. And a lovely sentiment to to end the the episode on. So thank you so much, um Sanam, for coming on the podcast, chatting with me, telling me all about the new book, The Persians, which is out right now in the UK. It's been awesome hearing about your your publishing journey and everything in between. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate this. And for anyone listening, if you want to keep up with what Sanam is doing, you can follow her on Twitter at Sanam1 or on Instagram at Sanamaluji. To support the podcast, like, follow, and subscribe. Join the Patreon for ad-free extended episodes and check out my other podcast, The Chosen Ones and Other Troves. Thanks again, Sanam, and thanks to everyone listening. We will catch you on the next episode.