When I first began writing and presenting my short stories about Iran, people in my workshop class looked nervous. No doubt remembering the fatwa placed on Salmon Rushdie’s head for his Satanic Verses, they asked me, “Don’t you think Iranians might take offense at some of the things you’ve said here? I mean, don’t you think you come off as a bit bigoted?”
The question bothered me a lot. What was I trying to accomplish with these stories: Why did my stories usually involve horrible Iranian men and frustratingly stupid Western women?
It took me a few years of writing (not to mention therapy) to recognize that I wasn’t so interested in creating an authentic rendering of a culture and a place as I was in describing an experience. I was writing about people I had known and their own tragic stories; about culture shock; about my own marriage, frustrated by serious cultural differences and an army of in-laws who regularly ate my liver for dinner. I wanted to capture the effect that living in Iran as a sort of colonialist among the natives had on me.
And even when I figured out what it was I was trying to portray, for the longest time my stories lacked depth. Some were overburdened by sarcasm– I was trying to make light of some dismal experiences, experiences I would have a hard time explaining, even after all these years, to people like my mother. Some stories went round and round in circles and never seemed to arrive at any real conclusion.
In the midst of my dissatisfaction–why doesn’t this sound right? why can’t I paint the scene properly?–my mother dropped a book off at my house. Now, my mother, being passive aggressive, will often “forget” a book on the coffee table whenever she wants to get a point across. Let an author do the arguing for her, that’s what she’s all about.
There was Sex Before Marriage when it was time to have “the talk.”
And Not Without My Daughter when I was threatening to follow my then husband to Iran.
Here, now, lay Traveling Mercies, by Anne Lamott. An innocent paperback with a quaint, little church on the cover. No doubt Mom’s way of spoon feeding me a dose of organized religion. Disappointed as she’s been that God never took with me.
So there it sat, for months on end, this Traveling Mercies church propaganda. Until, completely distracted, I forgot what Mom was trying to do and flipped through the pages for a quick read.
I didn’t want to, but I fell in love. Anne Lamott threw a spot light on all the bad stuff that lurked in my own heart. All the fear I had about myself. About the worth of my writing:
All those prophecies you heard in the dark have come true, and people can see the real you, see what a schmendrick you are, what a fraud.
And in a book about finding God, about Grace and personal salvation, Anne Lamott wrote about the less than admirable life that led to her transformation:
Life was utterly schizophrenic. I was loved and often seemed cheerful, but fear pulsed inside me. I was broke, clearly a drunk, and also bulimic. One night I went to bed so drunk and stuffed with food that I blacked out….I made seven thousand dollars that year and could not afford therapy or enough cocaine. Then my married man called again, and we took to meeting in X-rated motels with lots of coke, tasteful erotic romps on TV like The Bitch of the Gestapo….
Her writing was, to use her own words, “so sexy and intimate and stark that you almost have to look away.” Frankly, I want to lift all of her words and rearrange them on the page, because “everything is usually so masked or perfumed or disguised in the world, and it’s so touching when you get to see something real and human.”
I laughed. I cried. On an airplane, with a row-full of passengers glaring indignantly at me. But I never judged Anne Lamott, a woman who made such raw confessions. I understood her. It dawned on me then, a cold square of chicken in tin foil before me, that what was missing in my writing was honesty. I had started with the idea of, “Look what happened to me!!” But what I needed to explore was, “Look, what happened to me?”
Maybe, just maybe, I could tell this story without a smokescreen of justification. Maybe, just maybe, it’s OK to be the flawed hero of my own tale. A damsel in distress who is also manipulative, insecure, aimless, and confused.
It’s easy to talk about Iran. The Ayatollah Khomeini, Ramadan, a post-war economy. But, like Anne Lamott’s search for Grace, what’s hard to capture is the far more universal crux of the thing. The glaring mistakes. The failed expectations. The hearts that got broken. I wasn’t just an innocent victim; I was the second party in that proverbial tango.
For every sin I’ve committed, I get that there’s someone else out there who carries the same weight. Anne Lamott figured this out. And this too:
When I quit in 1986, I started getting healthier in almost every way and I had all these women helping me, and I told them almost every crime and secret I had, because I believed them when they said that we are as sick as our secrets.
