 Thank you, everyone. Thank you for being here today at San Francisco Public Library. I'm Michelle Jeffers, Chief of Community Programs and Partnerships. Let me do a brief land acknowledgment for our spaces. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Romitushaloni peoples, who are the original habitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their land, and we recognize as uninvited guests that they affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples, and we wish to pay our respects to them. Thank you. I also wish to thank friends of the San Francisco Public Library, who support all our library events, and Book Passage, who was in the back of the room selling books that I know many of you have partaken of tonight. So thank you very much. Our authors tonight, of course, need no introduction, but I'm going to give you a brief one anyway. So Susan Perry is an Iranian-American novelist, journalist, essayist, and book reviewer. She grew up in both the United States and Iran until the 1979 Islamic Revolution forced her family into permanent exile. Since then, her writing has focused on stories of displacement and belonging, of identity and assimilation, of trauma and resilience. Her first novel, The Fortune Catcher, has been translated into six languages. Her new, much-anticipated novel is in the time of our history, again, for sale in the back of the room. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, the author's guild, the San Francisco Writers Grotto, one of our library partners, and the Castro Writers Cooperative. She divides her time between Northern California and New York. Amy, of course, is the best-selling author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen Gods' Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning and Valley of Amazement. She is the author also of two memoirs, The Opposite of Fate and Where the Past Begins, and Two Children's Books, The Moon Lady and Saguah, the Chinese Siamese Cat. She has been a co-producer, co-screenwriter, and creative consultant for film and television productions of her books. And she also wrote the liberato for the opera, The Bonesetter's Daughter. She is an instructor of a masterclass on fiction, memory, and imagination. Her current project, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, will be published in 2024. And we hope she'll be back at the library for that. After their talk this evening, we'll be doing a Q&A, both with our Zoom participants and a live Q&A in the room. We are recording this, so we will be passing out microphones for you to use, so please don't start asking you're a question until a microphone is in front of your mouth. I appreciate that. Again, thank you to Book Passage, thank you to everyone for coming out tonight on a Tuesday night. Welcome, warm welcome to them again. Thank you. Thank you all for coming tonight. I'm so glad it's not raining. If you saw my Facebook post, then you know that I am in love with this book. This is one of the best books I have ever read. I'm not just saying that because Susanne is somebody I've known for a while, what, 30 years? Something like that. She and I met in 1989. Right after I was published, and she joined our writers group when she was writing The Fortune Catcher. And that was published in 1997. And now here it is. The last century. 26 years, last century. 26 years have passed. But I do wanna say that she has been busy doing other things. Not just writing this novel. She's a journalist and essayist. She's put literary events together. She puts together gatherings of women to encourage each other, inspire and support each other. Over these years, we've shared long conversations about family, about writing, about what politics, about skiing, about kids. And I'm looking forward to this new conversation that we've never had before, which is about this book. And I think that there is so much to talk about that we're gonna have to continue this over dinner and many other dinners after that. I wanted to tell you some things that I love about this book by reacting as I did. Not just as a reader, but as a writer. And there were so many times that I was reading along and I'd say, oh my God, how does she know these things? Or how did she come up with this metaphor? This is incredible. To be able to encapsulate something that's very complex with a great deal of clarity of what the actual issue is. And so that's what I'm hoping that we'll find out some of the answers to how you put this together. I also want to start off by asking a question, I think, that is always at the top of everybody's mind when you read a novel and the novel concerns family. And it has to do with, are these characters real? Did this really happen? This incident here, is that where it happened? Is that what the house looks like? So let me begin, Suzanne, by asking who in your family is really pissed at you for your having written this book? If there are any family members who are mad at me, they haven't mentioned it yet. So I don't know for sure. The one I would be most concerned with is my father, who's still alive. And I think watching from New York, he's 99 years old, and I had a phone call from him last night. He is listening and reading the novel at the same time. It's on his computer screen in large print. And he called me because he was confused about some of the characters and who this was and who that was. And I said, well, I'll try to draw a family tree for you. And he didn't understand or he sort of does understand that this is not our family and he is definitely not the father. And because the father is not the most wonderful person. But of course, this is a family like mine in that it's a large extended family. Many of the members had to flee Iran after the 1979 revolution and a lot of them landed here. And I lived here with my mother and father and my siblings and we were sort of the, they were all the anchor babies and we were the citizens. And that was 45 years ago and the family has grown tremendously. They're not in real estate, but anyway. So it is similar in that sense. I have always viewed the world from the point of view of somebody who belongs to a large diverse clan of people. And so I don't think I could write a novel that did not come from that point of view. So I know Suzanne and her family enough to know that her father is nothing like their father in this book. He's a dear, sweet man. So just keep that in mind when you're reading this. And also her husband is not like any of the husbands or lovers who are in this book job. No, my husband would like to believe that he's in this book. Like Julian, he's kind of a nice, yeah. Sorry. A nice guy, a cute guy. Okay, here's a hard question between your first book being published and these 26 years going by, what changed in the writing of this? Why, what happened? It's hard to answer that question. There are so many reasons why it took me this long. Some of them my own internal reasons that involved and some of them just the market. When I published The Fortune Catcher, Iran, people's reaction to Iran was ew, hostages. Don't wanna read about that. And it's changed in the last 25 years. There's a whole new generation of people who have Iranian heritage living here and living in other parts of the world. And Iran has changed a great deal. So I think there is an interest now. And with the recent uprisings, the feminist protests in Iran, of course this book became timely because of that. And I'm glad for that, but I'm also horrified by what's going on. And I'm hoping that this will be able to shed some light for some people on what Iran is, what Persian culture is, and how broad and diverse it is. You mentioned early in the book, I think it's fairly early and we've talked about some of this before about, there's a dichotomy here that has to do with ideology, politics, religion, what the country was, what it's become, what is becoming. And it is in these terms, Persia, Iran, Moslem, Muslim. And I think when I first met you, you use this word Moslem, which I remembered from a childhood Bible school and there were Christians and Moslems and Jews. So you were the Moslem. And tell me just a little bit about what is contained in those as concepts. So Persian refers to the culture and the region and Iran refers to the country that looks like a cat, if you ever look at a map. And it's the Islamic Republic and has been for 45 years. So Persianate culture goes way, way, way back to several empires and through several religions. The Moslem or Moslem or Arab invasion of Iran that happened in the seventh century is what turned Iran into a Moslem country. We say Moslem, I think that's the sort of British way of writing it, but we say it also because when you say the word Moslem in Farsi, you say Mos Salman, you don't say Muslim. That is a very sort of Arab or South Asian way of saying Muslim. We just don't say it that way. And so it's hard for me to say it that way. So, and it also I think reflects a time, a historical time when we would, that's what we knew, the Mohammedans or the Moslems. So that's the difference. Well, if you go back far enough, there was a time, you know, Persia, Asia, China. Chinese culture had a great deal of respect for Persian culture and you see it in the museums of the art that was borrowed. So anyway, we're related. Go back far enough in the DNA and we've got some relatives for sure. Definitely. I often find our books are described as mother, daughter, tales. And for me, they often are. Those are the main characters. You do have a mother and a daughter in here. You have many, many family members, as a matter of fact, these intersections in this very fractured family. And you have this going on in a particular time of history or several points in that time, sort of before and during and after and post and post in the new generation. So there is this sense of this family in a particular time and you include a very interesting structure in your book in which you have interleaving, they're like compartments or interludes, somebody called them interludes. Yes, interludes, that's... Jane Chavittori called them interludes. That's the word, that's the word. I had something called interludes to that, thank you. Interludes that start off in the time of our history and then you encapsulate it with it's either very personal or it could be about, say, Salman Rushdie or it could be about the release of the hostages and it could be about a character. But it brings to mind all the ways that our history impacts us globally down to the very personal. So I wanna ask you, you chose the title. Titles are very important, they're like, what this book means to me? What does this book mean to you and why that title? So I didn't think that would be the title. I just knew that towards the end of the process of writing this, these interludes came to me and I'm not saying they came to me from like woo woo came to me. I didn't know as if somebody was talking to me, a ghost or something. They just seem necessary to tie things up and to also to make sense of a lot of what I was writing about. And they're very different in style from the way I write. And I puzzled over that and I realized eventually when I was done with them that they sound like Persian poetry. And I'm not literate in Persian. So this kind of flowery Persian poetry, which is so important to the Persian culture still, it just, it must have permeated my soul. And so in the time of our history is a flowery way that you would say in the past, this happened. And when I use the word hour, for me it was about me being transnational and multi-ethnic and multi-religious because our history to me happens everywhere and it happens all at once sometimes. And it's a reflection both of the past and of the present. So that was for me and what happens personally is related to what's happening politically or societally. So they were markers, they're markers for me. You know, I did get that sense when you said it's like poetry. And it did have a feel to that was, it's almost fable-like in the beginning. Fable-like. So at first I called them, to me they were fairy tales. Yeah, very fable-like. And then it was nice to have this resonance style that was there. And you said you didn't intend to do it at first but it gradually as you write this form of a novel seems to come together. Some, you know, you have to get into it before you know what you need to be part of that structure. I also was thinking there was a lot in here that made me wonder if your writing style, your sense of yourself as a writer has changed over time so that all these things that have always been in you started to come out almost subconsciously maybe unawares until somebody like me points it out because we don't wanna be too analytical about what we're writing while we're writing it. You know, we can't deconstruct when we're constructing. It's the antithesis of being created to do that. So there may be my interpretation of what Suzanne has done in her novels may not be exactly true for what she did. But I think that it might also create some awareness that you may not be that aware of. So one of the things that I've loved in your novels that sometimes you would take in the, you would use the voice of a character to provide a perspective on something very complex. And it would be as though it's his opinion, her opinion, but it contains a lot that has to do with a whole bunch of things going on. And in this dialogue, but in dialogue of the outside world what's happening now. I'll just read you one of them. This is by a character named Nizam. And he says, he knew there was no such thing as a typical American, the country was vast. He believed there were broad cultural traits but he couldn't remember the last time he considered them or the ways in which they compare to other nationalities. He was American, as were his wife and kids. And when you lived in America, the rest of the world somehow receded. He realized this was what he'd once liked least about the culture, how it sought itself as above and apart. It was a mindset you put the whole idea of America at risk of disappearing. So can you talk about what's at risk? What might disappear? So I think the way we define ourselves as Americans, we often say we're a country of immigrants and we are. Unless you are native to this country you're either a colonizer or an immigrant or both. And no matter how far you go, everybody, no matter how many generations have been here, if you look back, that's who we are. And that's, everybody has that history who is a citizen in this country unless you're native. So if we try to make ourselves be a unique civilization here on earth, the way we have sort of exceptionalized ourselves as being, then we're no longer what we've defined ourselves as being. So what is America if it's no longer a place where people come to create new lives and create new cultures based on where they came from or who they marry or who they decide to create a family with, then I don't know, we're not America. Yeah, do you think that's changed in the last 30 years, 50 years that sense that it's much more defined or you're much more apart from the rest of the world or we're aware. There are some of us who think of ourselves as being apart because we're the quote, unquote, land of opportunity. And maybe we are compared to a lot of other countries. So I'm not saying that we're not the land of opportunity, but those of us who become citizens have to remember that we weren't always citizens. I think there are also many different immigrant situations. Immigrant situations, people come to this country for opportunity maybe for education or because there are other family members are here. But in your case, of your family and also the characters in here, they came to this country as refugees. They came here to escape because they would have suffered in a way because of the new regime, the changes. It was a little bit similar with my family in the early days that they came over, they had left a communist country, they had to come or starve. But, and it puts a different spin on a story. When you have people who've immigrated and have this thing in the past, wealthy, you know, businesses, homes, prestige status, and they come here and they had to put that behind. Tell me something about what's in this book that relates to what happened to your family? Because in the book jacket, it says, based on the real events of Suzanne's family, and you think, oh, that everything is true in this book. And so I wanted to- You don't write that copy, by the way. Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to, you know, give an indication that there are some very dramatic parts of your family's story that are in here, but much of it is different. But indicative of a lot of refugees. Indicative, so the characters are all, except for one character, the characters are all made up completely. And the way I write is I, my plots are, I mean, my plot is always character-driven, so I have to know each character super well before I can really understand what's gonna happen in the story. So I may start with somebody real, but then ultimately that person, you know, that character changes and becomes somebody else. There's only one person in the story who is based on a real person, and that's Olga, who is the sort of nanny, governess, whatever. And I actually started this book to honor her because we were separated. She went back to Iran willingly, but then got stuck there. And so we did not, we were not able to see each other, and we missed each other a great deal. And yes, she came to our family when I was 13, and she was an unconventional woman, and all of the things that I say about her in the book are true. In fact, she went to the bazaar for me, and she got that, that's a special stone called an Arir in Farsi. And she had it in, I told her to have it inscribed with Joy and Luck in Farsi for you after you blurbed my first book. I know that she was the one who had gone to get it. I love that character, Olga. I mean, she's just, she says it like it is, and she's... I wrote a whole book about, in her voice, the story of her, and nobody wanted to buy it. So maybe eventually somehow, but she has a really rich backstory. As far as my family is concerned, I will say this. My father was not a refugee. My father was the rebel in his family. Just as Mitra in this book is the rebel. Actually, I think of Mitra, Shirin, all of them as being rebellious in some way or another because to change and go against tradition, you have to be somewhat of a rebel. It's just the way we do it is different for everyone. But my father was one of six brothers and he came to the United States in 1950 and started a business here that was here and also back in Iran, a pharmaceutical business. And he married my mother who was an American, born and raised in the Bronx of what was then considered a mixed marriage, Jewish and Christian and he took her back to Iran and she fit in and he came from a very conservative religious family. So that's another story in itself. I wrote part of a memoir about that too before nobody wanted it. So for the writers out there, nobody wants ever until somebody does. So keep the faith. So I think I answered your question. So the refugee thing and then, you know, our family lost everything. We were very, very successful family in Iran and respected and suddenly everybody had to come out and most of them came to the United States. So this, if you wanna look at this as something about my family, it's really about that movement, that migration and what it feels like not only to people who have come here but to the people who are already here and Amy, you know what this is like and suddenly you have a whole bunch of family members who are either living with you or needing your help or and your life changes, not always in a bad way. It may be in a good way, but your life changes forever. Yeah, you're sharing a bedroom with five other kids. I was thinking about also that some of these people who come over, whether it's in real life or in your story, they come with a different sense of the politics or what's going on. And of course, the people who were described in yours either very different from your family. These were women brought over who were, you know, different somehow, the different background. And their politics were different too. And I wondered, was that true in your family as well, that they had a different opinion about the Shah, a different opinion about the theocracy? And they still do. Yes, yes, there's a lot of political polarization in my family just as there could be in any family. And yes, some of them were pro-Sah, some of them were, you know, not political. They just wanted everything to be fine. I have to say that when it comes to the situation with women in Iran across the board 100% my family, whether they're conservative or not, we loathe this regime and we want them out. And we want them out as fast as we have since the beginning. It was just, it's just been terrible in that sense. Not being able to go back, not being, you know, seeing the way these theocrats are running the country. It's sort of like what I tell my American friends is, imagine, and this is San Francisco, so maybe I can say here, imagine that Trump was in power for 45 years. That's what it feels like, that's what it's like. Trump and his cronies 45 years. Okay, you have lived most of your life in the United States now, and so you can be rebellious with impunity almost without having your legs cut off. But I was, what kind of rebelliousness, you know, there's inner rebellion as well. A lot of this book is about rebellion, rebelliousness to be independent of mind, rebelliousness against family and expectations. And, you know, also with that, this was really surprising to me, this rebelliousness of what we mean by belonging. You know, belonging is always thought to be a good idea. You want to belong to a country. You want to belong to a family. You want to belong to somebody who loves you and who you love. But then you talked about belonging in a different way that almost had to do with less freedom. And having to almost rebel from that kind of belonging. So this is an interesting question because I am not rebellious like my main character. Nor have I been rebellious like her sister who is rebellious in her own quiet, secretive way. I am generally, although I may seem rebellious on the outside, as my father says, I am very obstinate, but I am dutiful. And I needed to write a character who wasn't for myself. I wanted, I couldn't be that rebellious, but I wanted to be. The thing is being a writer is rebellious. And so what you've done is taken a lot of these ideas and these concepts and things that many people have placed on them and you bring it to surface. You bring it to the attention. And that writing is a form of rebellion and that's what I think. I think that's what you've done. Thank you. Rebellion or delusion, maybe. Thank you Amy. Yeah, now it's, we, there was another word that you've talked about that I think is really interesting. It relates a lot to what this family is about and it's the term polyculturalism as distinguished from multiculturalism. And I think it's very hard to define in a concrete way because it is amorphous. It is ever changing. It is contamination and influence and inspiration. I mean, it's hard to get around and you see it much more clearly when you take a story and impose that, or you don't impose anything. The family dynamic brings out the nature of that when the family is actually of different cultures, of different times and generations. But I know you've talked about polyculturalism outside of writing fiction. Can you? Yeah, so this polyculturalism is a word that's not used that much in the States but in Australia, New Zealand and in Britain it's used more often. So for me, this is how I see it. Multiculturalism is when cultures pretty much stay static and we move between them and belonging becomes more like a stage play. So you have to code switch in order to, and belonging is really about code switching well enough which is what I did for the first 20 years of my life. Polyculturalism is when you make a decision to accept and integrate different parts of your culture that you may have grown up in and you create something new. So the family may be a traditional family but ultimately it will fracture under the pressures of modernity or movement, migration, whatever. So the best way to maintain the family which in my mind is always the best thing is to morph it into something different. It's still a family but it's not exactly the kind of family that the patriarchal construct has defined. So for me that's the ideal and that for me is what America should be like and that's what I hope for and that's what I learned writing this book. I didn't understand. You know, there was so much I learned writing this book. There was so much agony and self-searching and ask my husband he was tearing his hair out, you know. I mean, it just was a very difficult thing to write. It took me a long time. It really took me 10 years because I didn't start this novel until 2006. Took me 10 years and then it took me five years to sell it, writers. So yeah, I think I answered it. Yeah, you know when you were saying that it's something that you learned or you realized your understanding of this grew and I think that is true of so many writers that as you put a book together it's almost like a container that you can start putting things in that you're learning. Whether you learn it by Googling and doing research or through life experience it all becomes part of your consciousness and it goes into the novel or you're writing it and somehow you don't even realize that these are the things that are coming out, what you know. And have you ever written parts of this book and then you go back and you reread it and you say, gosh, how did I know that? Where did that come from? All the time. I mean, I had that feeling when I was reading this I say, how does Suzanne know that? How did she know to just put it into those words? So that's, you told me that last night we were texting and Amy was, and also she did the video and was like, how did she know this? And I actually, my dad called me and he was like, how did you know such things? How you know this? My mother would say, how you know this? How you know this? And you must have a very good vocabulary. Your vocabulary in here is excellent. The words that she chooses are wonderful words. Yeah, that was the other thing. Yeah, it was interesting. It was the first time my dad actually, I have to say this, he's 99, I'm in my 60s. It was the first time I really felt like my dad was talking to me like I was not his daughter. A respected writer. It was weird. I mean, and I even said that to him, it was weird and then of course I cried and then it was, yeah. It's really hard to answer this question I know on the spot. You know the book so well, but then somebody says to you, what, you know, pick out something that you wrote down and you didn't realize that you knew until you wrote it down. Can you think of anything that suddenly caught you and made you, you know, gasp or cry or laugh or? I think one of the, there are so many things really. I did learn a lot about myself and about what I thought and I had to think hard about some issues that were really broad and I analyzed them. But the thing, one of the things that I did realize was this issue of how immigrants feel about the old country. Their idea that, you know, they come here and then they are, oh my God, I just had a grandson so my oxytocin levels are going through the roof, just seeing this, oh, so cute, so cute. Anyway, so this idea of the way immigrants, so my dad will still, and my husband, will still say things like Iran isn't like that or Iran can never be this or they don't know. And I'll say, you don't know Iran. You're Iran ex- They're rebellious. Yeah, your Iran exists only in memory. And that was something that came out of me and a line that came out of me in the book that I realized was so true that even, so imagine if you leave now and you leave this country and 10 years later, you want to return. You can't pretend to know what's going on here or what life is like. And even the language, your language is mired in the past. Your colloquialisms, the terms that are used, you don't have those and you go there and everybody knows, oh yeah, you've been away for a long time. You're American. Yeah, and you have characters like that who go back to a different Iran that they remember. And it's one of the reasons why I tell a lot of people in the diaspora, the way I feel about what's happening in Iran now is that our job is to support the protesters and hope that we can, that they can bring this regime down. Our job is not to get mired in their politics because we don't know anything about that, really. Yeah, you know, the late great Russell Banks who just died about 10 days ago. I first heard him talk in 1985, I believe it was, at the community of writers in what was known as Squaw Valley now, Palisades Tahoe. And he said, every novel is political. And I thought, well, that's not true of mine. I don't agree with that. And it took me a very long time to understand what that meant. It was actually something I wrote to Russell as he was dying, just to let him know that his words had stayed with me all these years. And I thought about that also in reading your book because no one would describe this or no one has described her book as a political novel. And yet, are they have? No, very few people have described it that way, but I think of it that way. I absolutely think it is. When we say that all novels are political, for one thing, we are looking at a story that's based in a particular time in a particular country with people of certain class and background, a history, personal history. And there are things in there that have influenced that guide our beliefs. And it also then guides what we do, our actions, our actions, our activism. And in that way, to me, this book is very political. Well, it's also political because in my view, the way the family is structured is then the way the society is structured. And ultimately, the government is structured. If we are patriarchal, then our government generally is patriarchal. It may not be a stark here or in Europe, as it is in Iran, but it's still there. So when I write about this family and the secrets they keep from each other, especially the women who keep many secrets in order to live, to have self-determination, it's for me, it's not that different from what one of the later characters in the book who is a writer, whose parents were writers in Iran, her parents are murdered because of their writing. And this is how women are silenced in a regime, in much the same way that we try to silence journalists here as well, not by killing them, but hopefully not. But, you know, by... Do you have any trepidation, you know, because it's political? I mean, it has views on many sides, but you know, we're all very aware of what's happened with Salman Rushdie, and his was a very different kind of a book related a lot to, you know, religion and... Yes, I mean, I'm not worried, maybe I should be, but I'm at an age now where, look, I have a compulsion to write. There's nothing I can do about my writing. It's just what I do. Rebellious. I guess, yeah, I guess. So I can't go back to Iran. I know that, and this book will make that for sure. But I haven't been able to go back before this. Olga and the character who is, has been sent back to Iran. When people talk to her on the phone, they, sometimes they have to be a little careful about what they say. Is that true for you? Very true, especially now. Yeah. You, it's very hard to communicate with people over in Iran. They have to have a VPN. They have to know how to protect themselves. And that's just normal people. If you're a journalist or an artist, get out. You have to get out. But there are a lot of people who are just protesting and going in the streets and saying, kill me so that at least the next generation can survive or can be rid of this government. I think one of the clear ways in which politics are in novels and especially with women is that our views of who we are are trying, are often dictated to us by what our rights are in that government. And the United States are the, what the laws are having to do with abortion, for example. And so there is a lot of that as well in here, in sexuality and expectations, in roles that women are supposed to play. And what's interesting, I've found that it was not just about Iran and their expectations. I started reflecting on this book as being so relevant about our own country and how we look at these dichotomies. We can't separate always personal, private, and political, and public, and governmental. And it brought that out to me, made me think. And that's what a good novel should do. It should make you think about things. I agree. And I'm glad that it did that. Your novels certainly do that for me. I think that for me, for example, what's happening here, oh, questions. I'll just say this. What's happening here, for example, when the Roe v. Wade decision was reversed when the Supreme Court came down in June, I have to say it, I felt like, oh, this is the same feeling I had when the Islamic Republic installed, made it law that you had to wear a head job. Why is it different? It's not. Yeah. Okay, as I said, I could go on forever. I wanted to ask you about how you knew about real estate development, how you, why all the characters have a certain smell to them. You're gonna find this wherever these characters go, the hows, everything. I didn't realize this until you said it to me. She doesn't realize it because this is the thing that you are the guide to the universe you created in this story, and your way of perceiving the world has a lot to do with smell. And I think that is also part of somebody who's raised with a polyculture. And let me just leave it at that, and we're gonna go to questions from the audience. I, thank you, I have a couple of questions that we've already gotten on Zoom or on YouTube. We'll also pass this around if anyone wants to ask a question. But a couple of, let's see. Here's, maybe we should have ended with this one, but what are some of your favorite books? I was not expecting. It'll be like, I've got about two minutes. What are some of my favorite books? Amy, you go first, because. Am I? It's easy. In the time of our history, it's excellent. I'm gonna be rereading. Aw, sweetie, you're too much. I'm gonna start crying. Of course, all of Amy's books wish I had written more than two, and I always admire your stamina and your ability to just focus. Some of my favorite books, it's hard to say. I can't think right now at all, nothing. You know, it's funny. I get asked that question all the time and on the spot. I can never think of anything. It's like I have never read another novel. I have never read anything else, and it's all going through my mind, including if I don't mention that person, they'll be mad at me. I mentioned this book and they'll think that I'm not a very good writer because I'm reading subpar novels or something. I don't know, it's a very, it's a much more difficult question than you realize. You know, we're talking about, and then suddenly, boom, examination question. I will plug one book. Let's plug one book. Robbie Alamedin's The Wrong End of the Telescope. Highly recommended. And he was in our writers' group. We have a good hit break. Until we kicked him out. Yeah. I have another one. This also came from our online audience. How was your, I think you touched on this a little bit. How's your writing compared to Persian poetry and any poets in particular? I mean, I've been exposed to the usual very famous ones, Hafiz, who in translation, I adore. Rumi, the right translation, I adore. And a more modern poet, Furuq-e-Far-rohzad, I know it's hard to say. But her poetry, especially translated by Sheila Volpe, I think she translated the book of poetry of hers called Sin, and you can get that in English. She was Iran's most well-known and tragic feminist poet in the 1960s. I'd like to get some audience members. Many of you may have a question. I can't promise I'll get to you in order. But if you want to ask a question, this is your chance. Raise your hand. I'll run over to you. Put the mic, I was doing it wrong. Put it right in front of your mouth about like this and we'll capture that for our online audience and for all of us here. We'll go here. Hi, thank you so much for being here today. It was wonderful listening to the talk. You mentioned stamina and writing can be very exhausting. You're excavating a lot, you're learning a lot. How do you recharge and what do you turn to when you're not at your desk or at your computer? What do you look towards? I'm not sure. I heard everything. How do I recharge when I'm feeling like- Over the last 26 years, how did you recharge to finish this book? So here it is. So the truth is compulsion. I cannot abandon it. I tried many times to say, I just can't do this anymore. I'm not gonna be a writer anymore. And it just didn't work. That's not to say that I didn't stop actually putting things on the page, but I just couldn't stop thinking of stories and that's the way I've always been. And so I would just recharge. I had a life, I had a son, I had a husband, I have a very large extended family and they always took precedence and they're in New York. So that was, there was a lot of travel. I wrote book reviews. I knew other writers. I got involved in other things. I was a volunteer. But yeah, I just, no matter what, I just kept coming back to it. And I think what's really important is get the support of other writers around you. Even if you're not talking about writing. Even if, and I don't mean writers groups. I mean, we had a critique group for 15 years that was amazing that it lasted that long. But just people you write with. You know, just write with them and support each other. I think that really was what got me through to finishing this on Zoom with my surveillance writing group every single day. Some of them are here. I'm paying them to be here. But yeah. I'm hyper focused on just my art. But I've since found importance in being receptive to other things that inspire my art. So I wanted to ask you, besides writers and poets, what other things inspire you? Well, I am so amazed by some of the artwork that's coming out in all genres. In all, I don't know. Do they call them genres? Do artists call? You know, some of the activist art that's coming out of what's happening in the protests in Iran. I am just bowled over by some of the, there was one, so yes, it all feeds me. I mean, painting, I think also mosaics and textiles. My grandfather was involved in textiles in Iran and my uncle, great uncle, was a rug weaver, a carpet weaver. So textiles and carpets. Yeah, I mean, art is so inspiring to me. I can't think of any specific examples right now, but keep doing it because it really inspires the work for me. Hello, thank you for the book and outstanding, being an immigrant from Iran since 85, I immensely enjoyed reading it. Thank you. And question goes back to Olga. Is Olga actually was born in Iran or it sounds she has a Russian or a Russian or a Russian. Sure. Eastern European heritage. Thank you. So Olga was born in Iran in the north in Mozambique. Her mother emigrated during the Bolshevik, right after the Bolshevik revolution from Russia across the Caspian. And that is part of the story that's not in here. So she grew up speaking, you know, Farsi, Russian, Armenian, Asari as well. So she, and her mother had light eyes. She had very fair skin and green eyes. So yes, you guessed right. Yes. Thank you. Thank you both so much for being here. I'm sorry I won't stand so I don't block. You mentioned being polycultural. Myself would be the anchor baby. And in the writing, I find so many different characters that are not of my culture, but I relate to so much. Was it intentional from your own experiences to draw? For both of you, like for characters that were relatable to a wide audience or is that your personal experience? Do you find you get that from your group, your families? Or is it just something that comes out in the writing where it just speaks to so many people to their own separate cultural relationship? So many things in there. Sorry. You know, I just have to write the stories that are there. They often have to do with characters who are women. I could certainly try to write a book about a character who's a man, but it would be why? Why bother? And, you know, just to prove something. The stories that interest me then do have something to do with my upbringing, my background. Although I can see myself doing stories in a different time, another time, because the ideas are universal. Or I could see myself doing characters who are half Asian, and that split sense of my identity being American and Chinese. It's not just racial, you know, it's one that has to do with identity. We're so involved in categorizing ourselves, pigeonholing ourselves, or at least, you know, like we're dice, like somebody's cut us into many, many, many pieces, and we define each one separately. And that's fine, but I think it's also really important for us to remember that we're all human beings, and there are so many things about our cultures, whether they're Latinx culture. I mean, I have two sisters-in-law who are from Central and South America. Our family is now filled with Asians, and Iranians, and Americans, and Dutch people, and, you know, I mean, Spanish people. So I think that we need to be a little more loose about all of this. And realize that if I write a story about an Iranian-American family, it's an American family, and you're gonna find so many things that you can relate to. Just as in Amy's books, I mean, I never thought of Amy as being really Chinese. I mean, she's American. Right? Yeah, you know, in the old days, you know, my books would be under Asian literature, never American literature, and it's a separate category. And one time, this second book, Hitching God's Wife, it was placed under cookbooks. Oh, I remember that, that was hilarious. Hi, Suzanne. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about those 26 years in terms of writing, and whether the writing that supposedly failed or didn't get published, how that led to this eventual book, are you kind of relieved maybe that this, anyway, just talk about how maybe the, I guess as writers, we all wanna know that our failures and the stuffs in our drawers is actually leading us somewhere to a better place. You are inspiring for those 26 years. I've been looking and trying not to look in the mirror. Listen, you know, somebody who's delayed, you're very inspiring to come out with such a beautiful book. Thank you. Well, I mean, Carolyn, thanks for coming, by the way. It's great to see you, I haven't seen you in so long. Anyway, okay, I mean, I would reveal every humiliation that occurred to me during the time between when my last book came out and this book, just so that writers would understand that it's not easy, but it's also not about the publication, it's about the writing. And I know that sounds cliche, but you have to find some kind of joy, some kind of knowledge, something that fills you in the actual writing and also in talking about it and in the people around you who can talk to you about it. So I do think that it was really hard. I won't say it was easy and maybe it was delusional of me to think that I would have ever get this published, but just be with it. You're a writer, you're a writer. It doesn't, the publication is later and if it happens, you'll be like me up here and if it doesn't and it very well may not have because this book went out for auction to 30 publishers and nobody took it and that was in 2017. So five years later, I sold it. Thank you both of you all. It was an amazing talk, here. Hi, yeah. So as a writer myself and identifying as polycultural, I often find it hard to base my novel in a specific location. So what advice do you have for someone who feels like the old world is a bit strange and the new world is still very new? How did you find the right balance to do that? So the old world, you feel like the old world is strange and you don't, I'm sorry, I didn't catch everything. I think my hearing is bad, hey. Yeah, so basically as a new immigrant, when I go back home, it's not completely strange but I do feel like I don't know the world and now here everything's really new. I don't know what to base it. I understand what you're saying. So for the first 20 years of my life, I went back and forth. So I lived in New York and then we would go to Iran for a year and I would go to school there and then we'd come back and I'd be here for another two years and then we'd go back and then later it was during the summers. I never felt like I fit in in either place and that's a really common feeling for what we call third culture kids, kids who are brought up either trans-nationally or whatever and all you want is to belong or to explain your other part to everybody else. So if you're writing about it, my advice, I didn't really be, I wasn't able to conquer or to understand that feeling until after I couldn't go back anymore. My advice to you is that just write who you are. You're both. You don't have to define one or the other. You are who you are and there are other people like you who will relate. Don't think that you're writing to an empty audience. I don't know if I helped answer that. It's the mass and we'll blame it on that. The masks are hard, yeah, I'm gonna blame it on that. You know, I would just add that when you're in flux like that and you feel like you don't belong to one and you're not quite fitting in the other, that is an excellent point where you start a story. That is a story because it has that tension, it has the ambiguity and you're working towards something else. So your storyline is to find out with this character who she is. That's the storyline, she's right. That very thing you asked me. I was intrigued by your statement that all books are political. And when I first came in tonight, I was, I have not read your book yet, Susan Garry, but I will, but I've read a lot of Amy's book and I was thinking about the Joy Luck Club, that one part where she realizes that she has stopped being herself in order to please her husband. And so she loses all her self-identity. And I was thinking that such a feminist, such a political statement that happens to so many women that when we marry or when we get into relationships, we try to please and it is a political statement, I think in the book. When you were writing it, did you see it that way? As being a feminist or political viewpoint or was it just purely personal? I wouldn't have looked at it in quite that way. In fact, when Russell Banks said that to me, it was during the writing of the Joy Luck Club. So it wasn't until later I realized how much our beliefs are infused with the beliefs or what is imposed on us by the culture, by the government. Being a feminist, I don't know whether I would have called myself that because it was just the way that I was. I was raised with the original feminist mom who believed I should become a doctor so I could leave my husband if he ever treated me poorly, that I should never feel like I needed to have a kid and that I should never let anybody more powerful tell me who I was. So my mother was a feminist and I was just the status quo of who I was supposed to be. Hi, first of all, congratulations, Suzanne. Thank you, thank you. I was really intrigued by what you were saying about coming up with characters before you came up with the story or the plot. Maybe this is clear. Yeah, Chris, point that. How you came up with the characters before you came up with the plot. I'm just curious sort of how you go about doing something like that and then I guess as a part to that question, did the plot itself emerge in ways that surprised you? Like you didn't know really this was gonna be the book it became? I think he's asking me about the characters moving the plot. How you came up with these characters chose them and then the direction the story went, which has got a really strong narrative pull too. So how did you keep that going? I think for me when I think of a story, I think of the end. Where I want my characters to wind up. They don't always wind up there, but it's usually close. So it's like years of getting there. And I use the characters so I managed to spend a great deal of time working on them as characters. I start by looking at photographs and magazines. I look to see is this what this person would look like maybe? Is this what this person would wear? What color? I mean really down to the whether she polishes her nails. What she smells like. Oh that's, Amy's right. I mean I had no idea but you're right. Smell. Yeah so all of those particulars get done before I even start writing the story. The story comes from who they are. And even the character of Olga who's based on a real person. I mean there are a lot of things she does in the book that she never did in real life. But she had to fit in to the story. So I had to think to myself okay what would Olga do? And I'm always asking myself that. What would so and so do in this situation? Or if I want so and so to do this what has to happen in the story for them to do this? I think of Olga almost being like a truth detector or it's opposite you know that she. Yeah I think so too. Yeah. Yeah there is a lot in the original version where she is very active. She's wonderful. Yeah she's. I think we have time for maybe one more question. Hi Suzanne. How, hi Amy. I'm right here. Okay. It's so interesting Amy that you brought up the notion that this is or may or may not be a political novel and whether Suzanne thinks of it as that. I've been thinking about and I of course notice the title in the time of our history. It strikes me that works of fiction like this that are almost auto fiction or at least very strongly informed by the author's own history are also actually historical novels. And I wonder whether you thought about that and whether you did additional research in order to bolster sort of the exact accuracies of the events and the history of the past 40 something years for your work of fiction. And I ask that specifically because you had mentioned that you had written, you had started writing a memoir and that you abandoned because nobody was buying it et cetera et cetera and you yourself were with the Dreamcatcher were a part of that first wave of now this great body of work that has been produced essentially by women writers from the Iranian diaspora about that historical moment the 1979 frozen moment in all of our lives that have greatly changed all of our lives. So I wonder whether you thought about that as a historical work. Did it sort of emerge from your work of nonfiction your memoir? So history has always been really, really important to me. So I mean I'm very interested in it. And I could, I would call this a historical novel but historical novels people think of them as happening maybe decades or centuries ago. This is 20 years in the past on the takes place in 1998, 1999. But for me, I am really, really, it's very important to me that I don't have any inaccuracies because I actually myself when I read I don't like to have to wonder whether this is this historical fact or timeline has been made up by the author or whether it was accurate. So for me, that's just a personal feeling. It has to be accurate. And I actually, one of my cousins just informed me of two mistakes I made in the book. And so I'll have to come clean and correct those at some point, very minor but still. So I'm very particular about that and I studied history a great deal and the chain murders, which are the murders of the writers and intellectuals that happened in the 90s and 80s, I researched those a great deal before I decided to put a character in there who might have, who would have been related to any of those people. So everything historically is accurate. And I know Amy's books are all historically accurate. I mean, especially Valley of Amazement was, I mean, incredibly researched, Amy. Yeah. I know whether they had toilet paper back then. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think to your point, politics has to include history because there is the, what was the propulsion that led to where we are in these political times? That's why I just thought the title is so apt because there is a lot to do with these times and how it's changing. And it could be going back to even an earlier time in Iran's history that also included the history of this family. But you can take any segment and you can see, the history has so much to do with the politics and this family. Everything. Yeah. All right, everyone, that concludes our talk. Thank you, a big round of applause for the audience. Good job. Good job. Thank you, everyone, for coming. Thank you so much for coming. They'll be signing the books outside in the lobby outside the Coret Auditorium. So join us out there if you'd like to get a book signed. Thank you.