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Susanne Pari is an Iranian American novelist, journalist, essayist, and book reviewer. Born in New Jersey to an Iranian father and an American mother, she grew up both in the United States and Iran until the 1979 Islamic Revolution forced her family into permanent exile. She is the author of two novels – In the Time of Our History and The Fortune Catcher – and her non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, National Public Radio, and Medium. A former Program Director for Book Expo, she is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, the Author's Guild, the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, and the Castro Writers' Cooperative, she serves on the board of the Lakota Children's Enrichment Writing Project and is an alumna of the Hedgebrook Writing Residency. She writes occasionally for the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies blog and divides her time between Northern California and New York.
Susanne Pari's website
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You were raised in a large Iranian-American family. How similar are the Jahanis to your extended family?
The people in my family aren't as interesting as the Jahanis, at least not that I know of. (Sorry, Family.) That's not to say that my fiction isn't influenced by real life people, events, or observations. But those are only the first bits and pieces that, over a very long and often frustrating and sometimes fun period of musing, daydreaming, spacing out, and drafting finally become the story's characters. For me, it's the characters who create and move the story, so I have to know them far better than I could ever know a person in real life. But I have to admit that I do engage in some minor thefts of reality. For example, the Jahani patriarch's office is an exact replica of my own father's; the decor was so perfectly indicative of the mid-century vibe that I couldn't resist. But the father who sits behind that massive desk is nothing like my straight-laced and playful dad.
Motherhood, in its many manifestations, is a theme in this novel. For some characters, motherhood doesn't require that they bear children, only that they love and nurture them. Why did you decide to explore this idea?
I grew up, both in the US and...
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