For many years, heartache prevented Nahid Rachlin from turning her sharp novelist's eye inward: to tell the story of how her own life diverged from that of her closest confidante and beloved sister, Pari. Growing up in Iran, both refused to accept traditional Muslim mores, and dreamed of careers in literature and on the stage. Their lives changed abruptly when Pari was coerced by their father into marrying a wealthy and cruel suitor. Nahid narrowly avoided a similar fate, and instead negotiated with him to pursue her studies in America.
When Nahid received the unsettling and mysterious news that Pari had died after falling down a light of stairs, she traveled back to Iran-now under the Islamic regime-to find out what happened to her truest friend, confront her past, and evaluate what the future holds for the heartbroken in a tale of crushing sorrow, sisterhood, and ultimately, hope.
Books by Nahid Rachlin: nahidr@rcn.com - Nahid Rachlin went to Columbia University Writing Program on a Doubleday-Columbia Fellowship and then went on to Stanford University MFA program on a Stegner Fellowship. Her publications include a memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS (Penguin), four novels, JUMPING OVER FIRE (City Lights), FOREIGNER (W.W. Norton), MARRIED TO A STRANGER (E.P.Dutton-Penguin), THE HEART'S DESIRE (City Lights), and a collection of short stories, VEILS (City Lights). CROWD OF SORROWS, (Kindle Singles).
You can listen to my reading of three flash-fiction stories at
Her individual short stories have appeared in more than fifty magazines, including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Redbook, Shenandoah. One of her stories was adopted by Symphony Space, 鈥淪elected Shorts,鈥� and was aired on NPR鈥檚 around the country and two stories were nominated for Pushcart Prize. Her work has received favorable reviews in major magazines and newspapers and translated into Portuguese, Polish, Italian, Dutch, German, Arabic, and Persian. She has been interviewed in NPR stations such as All Things Considered (Terry Gross), P&W magazine, Writers Chronicle. She has written reviews and essays for New York Times, Newsday, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Other grants and awards she has received include the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She has taught creative writing at Barnard College, Yale University and at a wide variety of writers conferences, including Paris Writers Conference, Geneva Writers Conference, and Yale Writers Conference. She has been judge for several fiction awards and competitions, among them, Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction (2015) sponsored by AWP, Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award sponsored by Poets & Writers, Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize, University of Maryland, English Dept, Teichmann Fiction Prize, Barnard College, English Dept. For more please click on her website: website:
A really excellent book right till the end - and the very last sentence, which might in other books of the same nature be the very first, overwhelmed me and left my eyes hot with tears.
If you don't know much about the Shah of Iran, the popular movement that spawned the revolution that brought the Ayatollah to power and turned a modern state into a fundamentalist Muslim country, you will after reading this book. But not from a political point of view as much as one that details the differences in the way of life, especially for women, who, in one stroke, went from lipstick and high heels, to hijab, from career women to scarcely having any rights. And from enlightened relationships to the legalised prostitution of them called 'temporary marriage'. It's no history lesson, it's the experiences of Nahid Rachlin and that is equally valuable - rather than the names, dates and political acts it will give you the understanding of events and their consequences for ordinary people.
The contrast between her and her brothers' lives in the US and that of those who remained in Iran is striking. But the US is not necessarily a welcoming place for those who would live there, even temporarily, if they don't fit in to some exceedingly narrow parameters. And just as much as Iran, Americans can be whipped up as a herd into political actions they barely understand and then visit those actions on individuals rather than the governments responsible.
Personal freedom is something the US takes for granted, and something every regime in Iran finds appalling, so the author chose to make her life in America and was therefore free to write and publish this book.
925pm ~~ I did not know about this author before reading this book. But I have four of her novels on order now from my favorite used book website. I figure if she can write a memoir as moving and hypnotic as this was, her novels must surely be the same.
This is my second book in 2022 that dealt with being a woman in Iran. It has never been easy. Family traditions, religious rules, government laws all combine to keep women from being the vital partners in society that they are meant to be.
Nahid Rachlin was born in 1950 in Iran and spent her early years being raised by her Aunt Maryam because Mother had given her away. But one day Father came and reclaimed her so she had to live with a family she did not know, one she felt did not want her there at all. The only friend she had within the household was sister Pari, and this book is as much about her life as about Nahid's.
We follow the girls through school, through the awkward years of learning who they are, who they want to be, and who they will be allowed to be. Because they do not have the final say in their own lives. Unless they kick the traces and dare to take control. But can either girl do such a scary and non-traditional thing?
This book can be aggravating, especially to Western women who generally make our own decisions in life and deal with the consequences. I wanted to smack more than one man upside the head more than once while reading this. Every person on this planet, male, female or anything and everything in between, deserves the opportunity to live their own life and be respected for being who they are.
As long as some of us insist on controlling the rest of us, we'll never get out of the mess we have made of modern society. And as we can see in our own day, not only in Iran but in the United States and all over the world, we have a hell of a long way to go.
Persian Girls is one of the greatest memoirs I've ever read. Nahid Rachlin brings us into a tense world of surprises that eventually evolves into a new hope. This book is vivid, dreamy, and displays the way in which a person can be personally torn between two worlds, the past and the future. Rachlin gives a great cultural portrait of Iran in the 20th century and what it was like to grow up there and then make the jump to America. This memoir was very far away from my own personal experiences, which is why I enjoyed the cultural education and escape from my comfort zone of knowledge. Rachlin makes the ride smooth and accessible.
This was an alluring story about a Persian girl growing up in Iran during the days of the Shah. When she is born, her mother gives her to her sister, who can't have children. She is raised by her single, widowed aunt, who is truly the mother she knows, until the day her father decides that he will take her back because she is of the age when she needs to be raised with a man in the household.
Imagine being nine years old, separated from your mother, and placed in a household where everyone feels like a stranger (even if one of them is your birth mother). The story evolves when Nahid and her sister, Pari become best friends, one wants to become an actress, the other a writer, but Pari (who is in love with another man) is forced into marriage by her parents and Nahid manages to come to America for schooling. They take different paths and their lives end up drastically different. You sense the loneliness of the young narrator throughout the book--everyone she loves or befriends, ends up being taken away somehow.
I love when a memoir combines story, setting and situation into nonfictional storytelling form, like this one did. I read this book in one and a half days and enjoyed it not only because of the great pacing and the underlying love story, but because I also came away knowing more about international relations. Like: the eight-year Iran-Iraq war of 1980, the 1979 U.S. Embassy hostage situation (which the movie Argo partly depicted), the censoring, and issues Iranian women faced,"Girls didn't ever run, laugh out loud, or look at boys standing in doorways or against walls. Boys were waiting for them to pass by, to put letters in their hands inviting them to secret meetings. The engaged girls moved in a slow way, spoke softly; any raised voice, any swift or jerky movement was considered unfeminine and not in good taste."
I did wonder, though, why some of the historical elements were placed into sectional blobs instead of disseminated throughout the narrative. And my biggest pet peeve (which has nothing to do with the quality of the book) was the awkward Kindle formatting...
Nahid Rachlin writes with impressive fluidity, making this memoir read more like a novel. Good flow. It moves fast, and yet is a complete story. She tells of being given to her Aunt Maryam to raise, because Maryam was unable to have children. So Maryam was her "mother." But then her father abducted her when she was nine years old and he decided it was time for her to live with her birth family in another city. She was miserable there, but her sweet older sister Pari gave her the love she needed and made things bearable.
The book tells pretty much her whole life story of repression and censorship and fear in Iran. She was able to convince her father to let her come to America for college, so she didn't have to go into a forced marriage. Almost all of her loved ones were still in Iran, and suffered the horrors of Khomeini (almost exactly like the Taliban) and the devastation of the Iran-Iraq War.
I couldn't quite go up to 4 stars only because she seems so emotionally detached from the events of her own life. It's almost as if she watched it happen from a distance rather than experiencing it. I kept wondering if perhaps the early trauma in her life taught her to protect herself by not feeling too deeply. Or maybe she feels it and can't translate that feeling into her writing. Well worth reading, nonetheless.
I know very little about modern Iranian history (all I had studied before was the Persians and the Greeks 鈥� that period of Persian history) so it was a delight to come across this hauntingly beautiful memoir by Nahid Rachlin.
Through Rachlin鈥檚 words, I went on a journey through Iran, through Imperial Iran to the Iranian revolution to the modern day period. Rachlin鈥檚 family is a messy, complicated structure caught between the old and the new 鈥� modern and traditional Islamic values and ideas. They struggle on an individual and societal level 鈥� there are shattered dreams, losses, distances, both emotional and physical.
The memoir reads like a novel; Rachlin is mostly a detached observer. She maintains a certain distance from her past 鈥� perhaps a coping mechanism to deal with her various traumas. The distance fades away however when she talks about her elder sister Pari. There is so much love and understanding between the two. I was moved to tears with the unfolding of Pari鈥檚 life: how the patriarchy squashed a vibrant woman full of ambition. The last line of the memoir will forever haunt me.
I read this excellent memoir in two sittings. The writing is fluid and compelling and easily takes you into the author's life in Iran and into the lives of the writer's two families - her adoptive mother Maryam and her biological mother, Mohtaram, two sisters. This moving story reveals the plight of women without a voice of their own in family or in public life and the difficulty of living in Iran during the time, for both men and women.
The memoir tells the poignant story of two Iranian sisters, Maryam and Mohtaram, their daughter, the author Nahid Rachlin, and of Nahid's sisters, Pari and Manijeh, all Persian Girls in Iran during the time of the Shah. It is also a moving story of the sisters' love and loyalty in the face of family betrayal and loss, and the precarious lives of women living under strict tradition in a male dominated society.
The memoir is also about Nahid's personal struggle with her life with her biological parents after she was removed from her adoptive mother's home in Tehran at age nine and returned to her family home. Nahid had been raised by her childless aunt Maryam since she was six months old and the shock of suddenly been taken away from Maryam by her father seemed to her like a cruel abduction. How she fights to resolve this and to lead her own independent life is the subject of this book.
I recommend this excellent memoir for those interested in women, women's rights, Iranian history, and the growth and development of a writer.
Nahid Rachlin is author of the novels Jumping over Fire, Foreigner, Married to a Stranger, The Heart's Desire, and a collection of short stories. She is an associate fellow at Yale and also teaches at the New School and the Unterberg Poetry Center in New York.
Thanks to the the publisher for a review copy of this book.
Nahid, the author, was wrenched at age nine from the loving care of her adoptive childless aunt into her ambivalent family of origin. Unhappy at this turn of events, Nahid eventually forms a close attachment to her newfound older sister, Pari. Nahid and Pari's paths diverge, though, as Pari is forced by her parents into an unwanted arranged marriage and Nahid manages to convince her reluctant father to send her to university in the States. The course of Pari's life ends up predictably tragic, with Nahid helpless to prevent Pari's difficulties or even to offer her much support.
Unfortunately I think I've read way too many books about the sad lives of Iranian women and it would probably take a pretty impressive book to move me at this point. Sadly this was not that book. Something about the writing felt mechanical and distancing, and it was hard to engage with the story. And despite Nahid's happier life, the book felt unrelentingly bleak as all events seemed to take place in the shadow of Pari's difficulties.
I can't honestly give this book an enthusiastic recommendation, then. But if you're less jaded than I am on this topic and can handle a very depressing story, go ahead and read it -- if only to remind yourself how fortunate you are.