[00:00:00] Jane: Welcome to historical Happy Hour, the podcast that explores new and exciting historical fiction novels. I’m your host, Jane Healey, and in today’s episode, we welcome internationally best selling author Marjan Kamali to discuss her latest novel, The Lion Women of Tehran, which came out in September?
July! July! Oh yeah, because we had a, we had booked for July and then
[00:00:25] Marjan: Yes!
[00:00:26] Jane: So you’re here. Thank you so much for doing this. I’m gonna do a quick bio and then I have a bunch of questions and then to remind everyone to put questions in the chat or the Q& A and after my questions I’ll field yours to Marjan.
Marjan Kamali was born in Turkey to Iranian parents. She spent her childhood in Kenya, Germany, Turkey, Iran, and the United States. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley, Columbia University, and New York University. She’s the best selling author. Of The Stationery Shop and Together Tea and the 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award.
Her novels have been translated into more than 20 languages. Marjan lives with her family in the Boston area. Again, welcome and thank you for doing this. I’m so glad we could finally schedule it. Thank you so much, Jane. Thank you for having me. Yes. Tell us about the premise of this wonderful novel.
I thought it was so interesting that it evolved from a character in another novel. that you were working on and you put aside. I was like, that is brave. So tell us about that.
[00:01:32] Marjan: Absolutely. After my second book, The Stationery Shop, came out, I started working on the next one. And it was a novel about four moms in suburban Massachusetts.
firstborns applying to colleges and to hang out to have fun, to relax. They would go to Miss Ellie’s Cafe. And the owner of the cafe was this elderly Iranian woman. But I was over 100 pages in when the pandemic began. And during lockdown, I was scrolling social media. It was that very strange time when it was two weeks to slow the spread, but we didn’t know what was going to happen.
And as I was looking at Instagram, I came across these posts from a friend of mine who was my friend, not just on Instagram, but we had been best friends once upon a time. And we had been very good friends in elementary school in Iran. And I thought again about the different directions our lives had taken.
I thought about how, now I was this writer writing stories in the U. S. She was she is working for a human rights organization in Iran. Yeah, and I just was so struck by how these friendships we make when we’re young really shape us. And I realized, truthfully, Jane, I wasn’t that interested in those four moms, nor their travails of having to worry about what college their kid goes to.
I was getting almost myself bored with that, annoyed with that. It was becoming a murder mystery, actually. As you can imagine. So anyway, I put that aside and I took a deep breath. I knew I really wanted to write the story of a broken friendship and the whole premise of the Lion Women of Tehran is friendship, the endurance of friendship.
We meet Eli and Homa when they’re just seven, and they come from very different backgrounds, but we see them go through the joys of childhood and girlhood, and then we see them go off to university together as young women, and then there’s a betrayal, but decades later they reconnect. In the US. Yeah,
[00:03:51] Jane: amazing.
So I this you partly answered my next question with your answer, but I loved, I always read the author’s notes. I’m obsessed with research notes. And you wrote that writing about Iranian woman has been a central theme in my life. I come from a long line of strong, very vocal and opinionated Iranian woman.
who in some instances broke new ground. My grandmother was one of the first full time career women in Iran in the 1940s. How much does your own family history, how much did your own family history help shape this story?
[00:04:26] Marjan: I think, even though I sometimes think it didn’t, it did, of course it did. Just coming from a long line of these very strong women, we call them lion women, which is where the title comes from, just fierce women who fight the patriarchy.
And my grandmother, she was literally one of the first career women to have a full time career. She would Get dressed in her very fancy outfits. Go off to the office every morning. She had four children. But she very much valued her career. And in 1940s Iran, she was part of the first wave really.
And then my own mom is a lion woman very strong woman. So I think as I write these books, that family history definitely informs the story. With the two friends in this book, Ellie and Homa, one of them, Homa, is always fighting. She’s an activist, she’s an idealist, she’s initially a communist, and then she becomes a huge women’s rights activist.
And I guess it’s not a surprise. Spoiler to say she does get arrested and my own aunt was arrested as a young university student. You grow up with these stories in your family history. And then when you’re writing the novel, bits and pieces inform it, and the characters are their own, they’re not based on any one person.
But so many of the truths are the communal lived history of the women in my family.
[00:06:03] Jane: Definitely. Yeah that, that makes sense. And that’s amazing about your grandmother, by the way that’s incredible. Yeah. Wanted to ask, these, Ellie and Houma, the other characters in the novel as well, but they’re just really beautifully drawn, very detailed they’re, I loved reading about them, they felt like real people to me, the, the novel spans decades of their lives, almost their whole lives, and how do you in terms of character development, I know you already had Ellie.
from the other project you were working on. How do you do, what do you do for character development? I know some authors do like diaries or, write essays or have profile sheets. Or do you do that or do you just feel your way along?
[00:06:41] Marjan: I do that. I’m a big fan of that. Oh wow. Oh yeah, all along.
For example, we were talking about how initially when I was writing the other book, the one that I did, ended up putting aside. The character of Ellie was this elderly woman who owned a cafe in Lexington, Massachusetts. Then when I plucked her out of that book to put her in my new book, I had to create an entire history for her.
I knew it was going to be based on friendship, but where do you begin? So a lot of it I figure out as I’m writing the first draft. But there’s certain decisions you can make right off the bat. Like when was she born? Okay. That’s important. I deliberately had Ellie born the year my mother was born, Ellie and Homa, because it was part of my little cheat sheet, because that way I could talk to my mother about everything she was doing at that age and say, what was your high school like, actually?
What was your uniform like? How long was the hem of your skirt? What did you do for lunch breaks? Did you go to a cafeteria? Did you go to a coffee shop? All those details I could garner. But I do write diaries. I love to do diary entries. In the voice of the main characters, so that I know it doesn’t really matter.
The basics are not as important as what’s in their soul. Obviously, as the author, you need to know when they’re born. But you also need to know what they have for breakfast every day. And you need to know what they fear the most. And you need to know what they regret the most. And you need to know if they could tell someone Maybe something in their heart that they’ve been keeping.
Who would they tell it to and what would that be? So that’s the deep character work. And I go deep. And I love doing it. And it takes forever. It’s like very efficient. But as you know from your own work, we’re not in this, Field to be efficient. No, I’m not.
[00:08:46] Jane: Definitely not. That’s so interesting though.
I love that. I feel like sometimes I don’t do enough of that and I, and like these characters, like I said, they’re just it’s. So they’re so rich and beautifully detailed. It really shows in the final product. The other thing that was so amazing to me is you, when you wrote about alien homo, when they were seven.
I, you really that you captured that age so beautifully, that feeling when you’re young and you make that first real friend that you love so much, and then also that feeling of you understand some things, but then other things are outside of your understanding. Like, how did you write from a seven year old’s perspective and make it feel so real?
Was that difficult to do?
[00:09:31] Marjan: It’s interesting because I just said how I had them both born the year my mother was born. But when I was doing the scenes of that initial seven year old foundation of the friendship, I used my own life and I used my own emotional memories. So I wasn’t born in 1953 and I wasn’t seven in 1950, but I was seven.
And I remember wanting a friend desperately and I remember those initial first interactions with a friend in school and then, my goodness, the first play date. And so what I did is I drew upon my emotional memories. Now we might think we don’t remember when we’re seven, But I really think that those Russian nesting dolls inside us are all the smaller, younger versions of ourselves.
And when you’re writing a novel and you’re, like, in it, you get to access certain things from your subconscious. that surprise you, and also from your memories. So I really, I took myself back and I tried to remember, what did it feel like to need to have a friend, to want to have a friend so badly, and then that first time you go into the home of a peer, and you enter a world that is not your family’s, and it’s oh, that’s how they do their kitchen?
Oh, and they’re, in our case, their TV is there, though not in the case of my characters, there were no TVs. But, just like that entering of a new world and expanding your borders, so I accessed all those memories. And it was a really interesting exercise for me, because I really wanted to capture girlhood.
And I think girlhood is so elusive. We don’t see it much on the page in adult books and also it’s elusive in real life because girls are one way when they’re seven and that confidence, that carefreeness evaporates sometimes when they hit puberty for all the reasons that, of which we’re aware.
And I wanted to capture our two protagonists. At their core before the world got to interfere with them and before the world got to insert it. very didactic version of who they needed to be. So that was a lot of fun to write. And I think those initial friendships we make when we’re children, they’re sometimes precursors to our romantic relationships.
It’s the first real intense relationship outside of your family.
[00:12:22] Jane: Yes, so true. And those chapters were so Charming the way they interacted and you also do such a beautiful job with not the settings and the smells and the food and the, the, like the, homeless house was such a a cherished place for Ellie and the baked goods, like I was getting hungry while I was reading it.
Yeah I love that. And you talk about like sensory stuff is throughout the book, but that part yeah, it was really just sweet. And like that, before innocence is lost, you got that feeling of that time in a child’s life.
[00:12:54] Marjan: Yeah.
[00:12:55] Jane: Yes, so great. So when you and your authors note again, you’re writing this novel when a young woman named Masa Jeanne Amini, and I’m going to pronounce that correctly.
Jeanne Amini, yep. She was killed by Iran’s security forces for wearing improper hijab. Hijab? Her death resulted in an uprising and I went back and to the news reports ’cause I, I remember it, but I hadn’t read about it in a while. An uprising of women and girls protesting. And how did that feel?
You’re writing the story and about history and here’s history repeating itself while you’re writing the story. And did it change anything in the final draft of the book? Did it change the way you wrote the story?
[00:13:41] Marjan: Yes, it changed the ending. Yes, so during lockdown during those first initial weeks of lockdown is when I started writing the line women of Tehran when I plucked Miss Ellie out of that cafe and made her the main character of the new book.
And then I wrote it the rest of 2020, 2021, 2022. It was September 2022. I was more than halfway done when Masa Gina Amini was arrested. And after her death, women and girls poured into the streets, because it was almost like the last straw of a long string of injustices that they had to bear.
And as they protested, men joined them in solidarity. And I was watching from afar, like so many people were watching from afar, initially with hope, and then with heartbreak, because those protests were squashed. The people were arrested. Many were killed. And some were blinded. Many women were blinded.
It was a very cruel response to this movement that threatened the power of a theocracy. And so I did change the ending. You can imagine I’m writing the story. I’m doing the 50s, 60s, 70s. And then this stuff is happening in real time, unfolding on my screen. And so it made me change the ending.
I hadn’t yet written the end. I hadn’t written it yet, but it made the ending that you have now read, and so I added a new time period to the book. And I don’t know if we do spoilers on this program, but it definitely,
No, I,
[00:15:25] Jane: I, that makes sense. Like thinking about the ending now, that may, yeah, no, total sense, but we won’t do spoilers, so we won’t give away.
Another quote from your author’s note, I’m a novelist and I know the power of story for as long as they have lived, Iranian women have known the power of story. The book is dedicated to the brave women of Iran. And it’s, I’m, I, as I was reading, it’s funny I, the Beantown girls is published illegally in Iran, and because they don’t go by international copyright laws, which, you know, yeah.
It’s what it is. But the, the silver lining of that is I ha I get letters, I get emails from women in Iran who have read it. And I’ve been corresponding with this young woman, Selvi in Iran. And as I was reading this book, I was thinking about her. And and it was just, it moved me on a deeper level, knowing someone who’s living there and going through this in 2024.
So what has been the reaction? I’m going to get a little choked up here. What is the reaction of this book among the Iranian women that you’ve met that have read it?
[00:16:30] Marjan: First of all, I want to thank you for writing to her, and I want to thank you for keeping up that correspondence, because they feel very much forgotten and disconnected from the rest of the world.
And the books that you and I write here in the U. S., they do get translated illegally because, A, you and I can’t even do a foreign edition because we’d have to sign a contract and we can’t because of the sanctions. And, But B, they don’t adhere to international copyright law. And, I know the stationery shop is out there in Persian and being sold in bookshops.
And I guess in a way, I feel, yes, it was illegally done, but I’m glad that the people are getting to read your book. And I’m glad they were getting to read my book, because it’s not their fault that they’re They can’t have access, so thank you for communicating with her. I’m sure it means a lot.
As far as reactions from Iranian women to me honestly, they’re very grateful. I think one thing that was happening during that women life freedom movement, which is the movement we were just talking about after Massa Gina Amini was killed and the protest happened is that people there, women there especially felt invisible and silenced, and they just wanted their voices amplified.
So what I get usually is, honestly, thank you. Thank you for telling our story. And I hear a lot from Iranian American women, and the Iranian American women, I just had a book club with a beautiful group in LA this morning. And they, they say, Thank you, because this is our sort of shared history and sometimes people don’t know it.
And as Harry Truman said, there’s nothing new in the world except the history you do not know. And sometimes people don’t know that the women were living in a certain way in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. And they don’t know that they had a lot of rights. that were then taken away. They assumed they never had them.
But I think it’s very different to have had these rights, to have had a certain life, and then to have been told, Actually, no more. It’s a very
[00:18:54] Jane: bitter pill to swallow. Very. And I, yeah, I was doing some reading today and, one of the things I read in one of these articles is that Iranian women today have less rights than their grandmothers.
And that was a chilling thing to hear, and I think you’re right that people aren’t aware of that. A lot of people in the fact. So yeah,
[00:19:14] Marjan: They, it’s like the reverse, like a woman who is 60 years old or above in Iran today lives with the fact that her daughters and granddaughters have less rights than she did growing up.
So my mother had more rights growing up than I would if I were there, or then that my daughter would. My grandmother had more rights. Can you believe it? Yeah.
[00:19:40] Jane: No, I can’t. I have some questions that I ask every author that comes on about more writing in general, about the writing process.
And for this story, it sounds like it’s semi autobiographical a little bit, and it’s taken from your family history. In terms of striking a balance between fact and fiction in your storytelling, historically, are there any strict rules that you adhere to?
[00:20:08] Marjan: Yes Honestly, I would say of my three books, it’s almost my first book, Together Tea, is the most semi autobiographical.
This one, I borrowed from my emotional memories and some family history, but so much of it, it’s just the character stories. But, I would say, the biggest advice I would give is, Don’t worry about should this be autobiographical or not? Can I include this or not? You know what’s real, you know what you made up.
So for example, with my first book, I know what is my life and I know what I made up. And the rest doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t matter. We’re not writing nonfiction, right? If I was writing nonfiction, I would. want every word to be actually true. But because I’m writing fiction, some of it can be something that happened to me.
Some of it can be something that happened to somebody I heard about. Some of it can be something that happened to my grandmother. Some of it can be something I made up entirely. It doesn’t matter. Whatever serves the story.
[00:21:14] Jane: Yeah that’s great advice. I think that With my first novel, I really got wrapped around the axle about truth historical fact versus fiction, and I’m a little, I’m a little more relaxed about that, maybe not completely, but yeah.
Oh I thought you meant what’s happening to the characters. Oh, okay, so actually, that was a great answer, because I really mean both you know, what’s happening with the characters and where do you deviate, but also from a historical deep understanding. Yeah,
[00:21:40] Marjan: yeah. Yeah. Let me say with the historical fact, I’m historical, historically factual.
I know not all historical fiction writers have to be nor choose to be. But in my case, because I’m writing about Iran, yeah, it’s if I’m not historically factual, I would have my head chopped off. With the characters I can make up, oh, she lost a child, she got a divorce. She hated her sister. I can make it up or borrow from my life.
But, with the historical facts in all three of my historical fiction novels it’s only facts. I can’t make up a single thing and I don’t. And in fact, Simon and Schuster takes the manuscript and meticulously fact checks it. So if I say there was a demonstration, there was. If I say, okay, all the history, even the demonstrations, it’s things like that.
That’s fascinating.
[00:22:33] Jane: Okay.
[00:22:33] Marjan: Yeah. That demonstration. I write about the big women’s March that happened in March, 1979, thousands of women poured into the street. Actual fact. No, I never make up the history because with Iran, I, it’s too dangerous. Yeah.
[00:22:48] Jane: That makes sense. That makes complete sense. And I feel, too, like most historical fiction authors we didn’t, we never deviate from the major dates and facts of the historical record.
I think that’s one thing that all historical fiction writers adhere to, really. But yeah. You talked a little bit about how you Develop characters. What is your, the rest of your writing process like? Do you plot out your novel or we talk about plotters versus pansers. Do you write by the seat of your pants or do you do you map it out, plot it out?
[00:23:17] Marjan: I have a system. As from your own work, we all have our own sort of unique system. Every time I start a new book I literally, I go to the, Drugstore or the stationery shop. I like stationery. I wrote a book called the stationery shop. So I buy a notebook. So for example, here’s a notebook.
This is for the yet to be written new book, but I can show you the one for line women. Cause it’s right here. This is the desk where I write. So this is the notebook for the line women of Tehran. And you can see. Yeah. So what I do is. The first draft is very free. I don’t plot ahead of time. I’m not a plotter.
I don’t have an outline. I barely know anything. For example, with the Lion Women of Tehran, I knew we would have Ellie, and I knew she’d have a friend, and I knew I wanted to do friendship. I knew there would be a sacrifice, and I knew there’d be a betrayal. That’s all I knew. So then I started free writing and it’s okay what would have had to have happened for a sacrifice and a betrayal?
And then the easiest way to get going is to know that time period. So it was like, okay, they’re going to be born when my mother’s born. That I knew. So then that gave me. the container of time, the 50s, 60s, 70s, and later. I do a lot of the first draft by hand. I find that writing longhand frees you. It allows you to feel a little bit like you’re not writing, like you’re playing around, like when you were a kid.
So in this notebook, there are literally scenes that you have read in the hardcover of the Lion Women of Tehran that I wrote by hand. And, they’re like here, they’re just in my notebook. Then I transcribed them. Those childhood scenes that you were mentioning earlier in our conversation were written by hand during lockdown with a pink pen.
I don’t know why they’re in a and then as the draft develops, I learn more about the characters and I learn more about their backstories. That’s when the diaries come in that we were talking about. You can write diary entries. I have a whiteboard where I pose the questions. It’s really like a puzzle.
It’s like a puzzle that I’m trying to solve. And I don’t know What’s going to happen? So I’m definitely not a plotter. As it happens, I learn. I’m like, Oh, really? You’re gonna die? Okay, didn’t think you would die. And then I finished the first draft and then I have something right, like clay to work with.
And then that’s when the real work begins. And that’s when I go back and I, it’s not even revising, it’s like literal restructuring and, I’m like, Oh my God. revisioning everything and changing the chronology, the order in which the reader gets the events, and all kinds of stuff. Then I’m a bit more of a plotter in that second draft.
[00:26:17] Jane: Fascinating. I love hearing people’s processes because everyone’s is it’s so different and there’s no right or wrong way. It’s just yeah, so interesting. It’s just
[00:26:24] Marjan: whatever works for
[00:26:25] Jane: you. There’s no right or wrong. Absolutely. I wanted to ask you because you teach writing and I have friends.
We have taken your classes and adored having you as a teacher and what, how is teaching writing shaped your work? Has it shaped your work in any way?
[00:26:44] Marjan: I think, when you teach, you’re constantly reminding yourself. of your craft and its elements. So when I’m teaching, I’m, excuse me, I’m covering like, let’s say setting and the importance of setting, but I’m reminding myself of all of that too.
And I just like sharing anything I can about the creative writing process because it’s very nebulous. It’s incredibly intangible and it’s a bit mysterious. And so I don’t know if you can really teach writing, but you can teach the craft of writing and you can say, look guys, here’s how you can develop a character.
Because writing students may not think the same way. To write diaries in the voice of the, they might think, why would I do that? And in fact, I do get resistance, Jane. Sometimes they’re like, Oh, but that’s going to take up a lot of time. And then I’ll say what have you been watching lately? I watched this show on Netflix.
I binge watched 27 episodes. And I’ll say, I think you have the time. I’ve been scrolling TikTok for three hours. Exactly. Exactly. And I’m like, Why is that a better use of your time than writing in the point of view of your character in your diary, yeah, I do love teaching. It’s very interesting.
And it’s very interesting to again, like you said, see how everybody’s process is different.
[00:28:20] Jane: I love to see. Yeah. I love learning how different people do it. I know that, people, at the audience, we have some aspiring authors in the audience always on, on these podcasts. And there’s some great, lovely comments about your books and I will send you the text threat, text messages.
Chat. Yes, thank
[00:28:37] Marjan: you. Because anytime you see me put on my glasses,
[00:28:41] Jane: to be able to read the text. I’ll text you. I’ll send you a document afterwards. But so you published three novels highly successfully. You teach writing workshops. So what’s the best advice you can give to aspiring authors about writing and about getting published, which are very different things as we know, but what is your best advice?
[00:29:04] Marjan: The first part of my advice won’t surprise anyone. It is to read. And now I teach undergrads and sometimes, not my students, but I have heard of students who come into the creative writing workshop and they say, I don’t like to read. And I know this is going to get me into trouble, but if you don’t read, I just don’t understand how you could possibly think that.
you could write because they go hand in hand. So read, which I’m sure most of your aspiring authors know. The second part is a great piece of advice that I first heard from Anne Hood and I wish I’d heard it in my 20s. It’s to throw away the clock. Throw it away. Put that notion of a deadline or X by X.
I have to write. A thousand words by the end of the week. No, none of that. We don’t need to count so much. We just need to play and to write. And I would say, no one on this planet Earth is going to care about your writing and your career as much as you do. Not your mother, not your spouse, not your best friend.
You have to care. And Or at least that’s been my experience. If there are other writers out there who’ve had that kind of level of passion, good for them. But you have to believe in yourself, and you have to believe in your books, and you have to believe in your characters. No one else is gonna do that.
Or should they? It’s your thing. You should do it. And the other, I said I would say two, now I’m saying like five, but the other piece of advice I would give is to stop thinking of this as something you have to do, or must do, or a chore. It is a privilege. It is a privilege. There are people in this world who are, in the coal mines and you and I just spoke about women who have no rights or very little rights.
So it’s a privilege. It’s a privilege to take pen to paper.
[00:31:18] Jane: Yeah, all very good advice. I skipped a question that I meant to ask you because I’m just so excited for it. The stationery shop is being adapted by Netflix. Is that, did I get that right? It was
[00:31:30] Marjan: optioned by HBO. HBO, okay. But that fell through, I’m going to be honest.
That’s not happening. Okay. I’m not going to talk about why, but yes, no.
[00:31:40] Jane: Is there any anything in the works for any of your, all three of them? Because this would, I was like trying to picture, I was picturing it as a movie in my mind. It’s so cinematic.
[00:31:48] Marjan: Has there been any interest? There has been interest in the Lion Women of Tehran, and then I got the rights back to the stationery shop and there’s interest in that.
So both are like on the back burner. When Warner Brothers and Discovery merged, they bought HBO. Oh, hBO Max became Max, and all these period dramas were put on the chopping block, including mine. So now we’re starting over and we’ll see what happens.
[00:32:16] Jane: All right. Fingers crossed. I know you’ll keep us posted.
Are you ready? You just mentioned your new project. Are you ready to share anything yet or not yet? I will
[00:32:25] Marjan: share a little bit. So we know, I bought the notebook. Isn’t that good? So I have step one. It’s pretty darn blank, my friend. Look. That’s okay. But I have the notebook. So I think that’s a step. I know the theme.
I know the theme. The theme is gonna be you could argue this is the theme of all three of my books, which is that love outlasts loss. In Together Tea, it’s a mother daughter story, they immigrate to America, it’s loss of country, loss of identity, but in The Stationery Shop, we know it’s a love story, and it’s about lost love, but how that love stays.
Oh my God. I love our guests. That was Mona. Mona. Mona Lisa. Mona
[00:33:13] Jane: is my
[00:33:14] Marjan: daughter’s
[00:33:15] Jane: name. No, I remember. Okay. I remember because your author’s note said that too. I forgot you had a daughter named Monia. That’s Mona Lisa. Okay.
[00:33:23] Marjan: That’s what I love. I love just by virtue of the name. Yes. And the friendship story is also love at last loss.
So this fourth one, Jane, all I will say is. That’s the theme. And it’s going to touch on grief because I lost my father in August. And this has just shown me a, how lucky I was to have had him as long as I did. But B I’m just really, I am just going through a lot of the grief still and learning about losing a parent when you’re middle aged, which I know is very different than losing a parent when you’re young.
But it has its own meanings, right? You’d never know the world without them. So yes, I guess I’m not really saying much because I need to get going and I need to write so I can tell you what it’s really about.
[00:34:17] Jane: And you shared some beautiful stories about your dad on social media, and I’m really sorry for your loss, because he sounded like an amazing man.
I’m really sorry about that, and that you’re still going through the grief, of course. Yeah. Yeah, understandably. How can readers best keep in touch with you these days? Yes.
[00:34:38] Marjan: The aforementioned Mona, my Mona, has told me chided me that I never mentioned that people should follow me on social media. I still, in my middle aged way, feel it’s a little odd to do but it isn’t, is it?
I’m supposed to do that. Yep. I’m gonna put, this is my handle on Instagram, I just put it in the chat, and obviously I’m on Facebook, I have a public page, an author page, it’s just my name. I am on Twitter, I’m one of the last remaining old guard there. But yeah, I think Instagram these days is the best way.
And my website, which is just my name dot com. And that’s also good. And I do have a newsletter that I just started, Jane. I sent out the first one in November. And you can see my newsletter. I’m also supposed to say that. I’m so not good at those things, but. Oh, it’s hard, I know. I’m supposed to tell them.
So yeah, that would be good.
[00:35:41] Jane: Yeah, I’ll take a couple questions and then we don’t want to take up too much more of your time. I see a couple in the in the chat and the Q& A. Oh, yeah, that’s okay. So those are pretty much answered. What do you like to read for pleasure? What do you enjoy reading?
[00:36:01] Marjan: So I love reading. I read a lot of contemporary fiction. I read a lot of historical fiction. I used to read more classics. And I want to get back to that. I feel like you know that when you are an author, you get sent a lot of galleys. that, people would like you to endorse and to blurb. And so that takes up a lot of my time.
And I realized recently, I haven’t read a classic in a very long time. And I really want to, because I feel that roots me. And that’s what I grew up reading, and it makes me feel grounded. And, but reading in general makes me feel grounded. So yeah,
[00:36:44] Jane: I agree with the classics every, I haven’t done that in a while either.
either. And when I do, I’m always like, Oh, I missed you. It’s so much like going back to
[00:36:52] Marjan: the old friend. Yeah. And it’s very different. It’s differently structured and differently written, but it’s, I do appreciate it.
Yeah. I would say I
read fiction. I need to get better at reading nonfiction. When I read nonfiction, it’s always a memoir.
But you will rarely find me reading like the history of automobiles, I’m not good at doing that.
[00:37:17] Jane: No. One last question that always comes up. Your covers are really unique and beautiful. The palettes are beautiful. Do you have much of a say in cover design? Do they give you much of a say?
[00:37:28] Marjan: I do have some say. The reason the Lion Women of Tehran is so beautiful, I take no credit for it. There’s a wonderful art director who is responsible for it at Simon Schuster. And she also did the stationery shop. Because she did the stationery shop and because now Lion Women of Tehran, They tried to echo the covers and have them rhyme.
And I’ve just been blessed to have these gorgeous covers. If I did it, it would be like a stick figure. I don’t have that on. Yeah, but they do. So I do approve of it. I’m like, yay. It’s really there. They go with these jewel tones, which I think mirrors the atmosphere of just the vibe of the book, so
[00:38:20] Jane: yeah,
[00:38:20] Marjan: they’re gorgeous.
[00:38:21] Jane: So I, this was delightful. Thank you so much for taking the time on this very rainy, windy night in Boston. It’s been crazy. I was afraid, yeah, we were going to lose power because I’ve seen power trucks going by in my neighborhood and I’m like, we have to get this in. So I know I’m grateful we didn’t lose
[00:38:39] Marjan: power.
[00:38:40] Jane: I know
[00:38:41] Marjan: he’s lost power. Yes.
[00:38:42] Jane: Yeah. Thank you again. I adore your books and you’re such an inspiration and yeah, so please keep in touch and I’m going to have next week I’m doing ask me anything final historical happy hour about my new book that’s coming out in July. But this is a great, so you’re my last author of 2024.
Thank you
[00:39:01] Marjan: so much. I’m honored to be. Thank you, Jane, for having me. Thank you for being not just a great writer, but I consider you like a writer friend and just a wonderful person in our community. So thank you so much for having me. Oh, you’re
[00:39:16] Jane: welcome. And likewise, and we’ll have to do coffee soon when it’s on a better weather night than this.
Yes. Absolutely. All right. Take care of my job. Have a great night. everybody. Thank
[00:39:27] Marjan: you.
[00:39:27] Jane: Bye. Thank you.
