Feature > Interview > INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR NAHID RACHLIN BY SHABNAM REZAEI
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Nahid Rachlin is a modern day New Yorker and a prolific writer with many accomplishments to be proud of. She is not only the author of a new book entitled Persian Girls, she also counts novels like Jumping Over Fire, Foreigner, Married to A Stranger, The Heart’s Desire, and Veils to her collection of works. My discussion with her below:
PersianMirror: Tell us a little about yourself.
Nahid Rachlin: I grew up in Iran under the Shah’s regime. My father was a judge and then he resigned from that and became a lawyer. I lived in Tehran and Ahvaz. My aunt adopted me from my mother when I was six months old. She was a widow and couldn’t have children. My mother gave birth to ten children. Then when I was nine years old my father decided to take me back. My aunt lived in Tehran, my parents in Ahvaz. After completing high school in Ahvaz, I came to the United States and studied psychology in college. But my heart was always in writing. After college I pursued writing—I went to MFA programs at Columbia University and Stanford University. Ever since high school I have been writing, at first fiction and recently a memoir called Persian Girls.
PM: Where do you live now and what made you decide to live there?
NR: I live in New York City (Manhattan). I decided to live in New York, after I finished my provincial college in St. Charles, Missouri. I felt foreign and out of place in the college with a homogeneous student body, who had rarely seen a foreigner! I was forced to go there because my father insisted on my going to a woman’s college near one of my brothers who came here before me. He was going to medical school in St. Louis and this college was near him. I felt liberated as soon as I came to New York City, because of the ethnic variety. There is also the fact that I am very drawn to the arts and New York has an abundance of that.
PM: When did you decide to become a writer and how did it all start?
NR: The fact that I was adopted by my aunt made me feel I was different from my peers. When my father took me away from the home I knew, I was traumatized. These experiences made me introspective and I turned to books for answers to questions I couldn’t understand. My interest in reading led to my desire to write. I found that writing about my own experiences or about what went on around me, giving shape to them, made me feel peaceful. In high school I went into a room for a few hours every day and wrote. I got encouragement about my writing by my composition teacher.
PM: Tell us about Persian Girls.
NR: My latest published book is a memoir called Persian Girls. I develop the two homes I had. One with my aunt, a staunchly religious Muslim but very lenient with me and an excellent mother to me. The other with my parents, who were “modern,” that is they didn’t observe the religion but they were cold and actually restrictive with their daughters.
A big part of the memoir is also about the lives of myself and my sister Pari, as we took different paths, she remaining in Iran and I coming to America. When I started living with my birth family I became very close to my older sister Pari. We both resisted the roles prescribed for us by our parents, our school, the wider society. She wanted to become an actress and I a writer, both considered undesirable for one reason or another. We were allies against our middle sister, whose dream was closer to what was expected of her.
Then I managed to come to America while Pari got trapped in a bad arranged marriage and had to give up her aspiration to become an actress and all the independence she was striving for. I was stronger and more determined than Pari, perhaps because of all the love and attention that my aunt Maryam had given to me, whereas
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