Starred review from March 30, 2020
In this wonderful essay collection, novelist Khakpour (The Last Illusion) passionately and wittily explores the writing life and the Iranian-American experience. Not surprisingly, political concerns abound; Khakpour recalls, early in the Trump presidency, hearing of deportations in her majority-Muslim apartment building and encountering rumors that naturalized citizens such as herself—her family left Iran soon after the revolution—would be targeted. She threads memoir throughout, touching on her family life and on her years as “the only Iranian not only in my grade but in the whole elementary school, middle school, and high school.” In recounting the writing of her first novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects, Khakpour offers a revealing set of reflections on the travails and joys of being a writer, as she finishes the manuscript and submits it to the publisher, hits assorted prepublication snags, and embarks on the reading and book festival circuit. She also shares the pitfalls of being known as an Iranian-American writer, or, due to her novel’s themes, a “9/11 author.” Lovers of the essay and those interested in immigrant literature will be particularly delighted, but any reader can enjoy Khakpour’s passionate and enlightening work.
Starred review from May 1, 2020
In this new collection of essays, Khakpour (Sick: A Memoir) writes of rises and falls in patterns through career successes and emotional defeats. The pieces wrestle with ideas and inner conflicts, but they also tell candid stories about immigration, illness, whiteness, and the writer's life. In reflecting on her long path to becoming a published author, Khakpour recalls, "It took me a decade to realize that the only truths worth anything in the end were those very details that, in resisting narrative, told the real story." In pieces that standout with numbered paragraphs, Khakpour writes to another young writer, or to her abstracted self. She also divulges resentments and insecurities, and even includes a forbidden essay, one that has never before been published. Throughout, she documents her survival of white America as a Iranian American; yet, Khakpour seems to ask on every page: Is this all survival is? VERDICT Emotions of sorrow, anger, and anxiety loom large in Khakpour's inner and outer experiences in America, but the humor in her reflections keep this book immune from wallowing. A triumphant entry in the personal essay canon.--Sierra Dickey, Ctr. for New Americans, Northampton, MA
Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from May 1, 2020
Much praised novelist Khakpour (The Last Illusion, 2014) shared her health and depression struggles in her memoir, Sick (2018). Here she gathers essays written over a decade in which she explores nuances of personal and communal identity as an Iranian immigrant. With a focus on race and ethnicity, Khakpour chronicles her gradual coming to terms with her Iranian familial history and delves into the anxiety of being brown skinned in America. Alternately conflicted and confident, excited and anxious, indulgent and exasperated, Khakpour engages with her complex Iranian American heritage with vibrancy and candor. She looks back to her teenage experiences, including working as a sales girl in Pasadena, fascinated and inspired by the Iranian designer, Bijan. She articulates the affinity she felt for Faulkner's work as a college student visiting the South. She offers keen insights into her life in Los Angeles and New York, zeroing in on writers' vulnerabilities and preoccupations, including financial worries. Khakpour's willingness to reveal the less than shiny aspects of her past makes her essays richer; her thematic focus on immigrant identity, class, and race make this collection illuminating and rewarding as she demonstrates from varied perspectives just how the personal inevitably becomes the political.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)
Starred review from April 1, 2020
A collection of incisive essays about hyphenated identity. These essays, writes Khakpour, "are a testament to the greatest and worst experience of my life: being a spokesperson for my people, a role I never dreamed of and never asked for. This is my pigeonhole, and this is my legacy....These pieces are my bridge, and they are my cave." The author, who has also published two novels and a memoir about her battle with Lyme disease and chronic misdiagnosis, is clearly--and understandably--uncomfortable with the mantle of "Miss Literary Iranian America," as she sardonically refers to it. In the penultimate essay, "How To Write Iranian America, or The Last Essay," she traces the arc of her career, from fledgling writer who initially refused to focus on identity to New York Times contributor whose prolific output depends on her ability to "write an essay on absolutely anything for these people, provided that it's about Iranian America--which it will be." Consequently, in the Times and elsewhere, Khakpour has churned her way through "Islamic Revolution Barbie," reality TV with a Persian twist, the Islamic New Year, and other topics to appease the American appetite for the Iranian "other." In the final, titular piece, which she notes was never intended for publication, the author writes about how, "like a worm," the essay "grew inside me until it could not be contained." It's identity confusion, about which stories we chose to tell about ourselves, and about being brown in a country more blindingly white under Donald Trump. "This is an essay that many of my own people would tell me to go kill myself for," writes the author, "because I deny the whiteness they claim....I want to remind those who can claim whiteness that they are a very small group." Provocative pieces that detonate many notions of identity.
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