How to kiss her inheritance allowed Sanam Mahloudji to write “Les Perses” – The County Orange register

Shirin Valiat is a lot.

The Houston event planner is daring, obstinate, self-absorbed and perhaps not entirely grateful for the niece that saved him after an arrest for attempted prostitution in Aspen. But at the end of “The Persians”, the first novel by Sanam Mahloudji, you too affectionately call “Aunt Shirin”.

Indeed, “Aunt Shirin” is the title of the short original story of Mahloudji, published in McSweeney’s Quarterly in 2018, which launched what was going to become a family saga extending from Iran pre-revolution to America 00s. The novel was preselected for the female fiction prize 2025.

“In the simplest sense, it was one of the first times I wrote Iranian characters,” said Mahloudji during a recent zoom call. “I have been writing news for several years, and I was really moved to want to write about the Iranians for the first time and to be their being of Iran part of the story.”

Born in Iran, raised in Los Angeles and now based in London, Mahloudji began writing news after the death of her father in 2010. At the time, she worked as a lawyer.

“I followed this day’s lesson and I was sitting there trembling after saying by the instructor that I could write everything I wanted,” she said. “I think that, perhaps, contrasting that with what the writing of a legal memo looked like, I had the impression that this kind of universe opened for me.”

But her interest in writing Iranian characters is partly entirely with an experience at the start of the first Trump presidency when she volunteered to go to Lax to speak with the Iranians who could not enter the United States

“I did not practice the right at the time, but I went to support people. I spoke with families and women landing from Tehran, some of whom have to separate family members and feel really terrified, ”she recalls.

“I supposed that it would not be something that I would be qualified to do, as a person who grew up in Los Angeles,” recalls Mahloudji. “But I realized very soon that my very name and my ability to communicate with them – my ability to hear their name and not have to ask them how to spell it, that I immediately understood them – it meant something.”

The experience has changed Mahloudji’s perspective on his writing.

“I always thought that I was, in a way, inauthentic as Iranian, and if I wrote a novel, I could never manage the writing of a book on Iranians and in the way I would like,” she said. “In a way, having this experience and realizing how even after spending most of my life in the United States, people like me were treated as if we were not belonging and were not authorized in the country. There was this feeling of OK, I am Iranian and these little games that I play with myself to distance myself from my own culture, I had to challenge this. ”

What started as a new one has turned into a series of them. Before realizing it, Mahloudji wrote a novel. “The Persians” is told from the point of view of five women, which is part of a line which lent their prestige and its family wealth in Iran before the 1979 Revolution.

Elizabeth, the matriarch that remains in Tehran, sees her fortune decrease in the decades that followed the new regime. Seema, the eldest daughter, moved to Beverly Hills and dies shortly before the sister Shirin’s misadventure in Aspen. Bita, Seema’s daughter, is a law student in New York, and Niaz, Shirin’s daughter, was raised by her grandmother in Tehran, where she became a little raboubly while learning the family history that remains unknown to the American branch.

The novel takes place like a soap opera-Will Elizabeth’s family learn its secret? Will Shirin beat the charges against her? – But it is the one who is imbued with humor.

At the center of the “Persians”, however, is the 1979 revolution.

“For a long time, one of the things I would say about the book is that it is not a book on the Revolution. I didn’t want to write a book on the revolution, ”explains Mahloudji. “But it is in a way the elephant in the room for each Iranian on earth. There is before 1979 and after for each Iranian. This affected all our sense of who we are, where we live, where our families are, where our future could be. It is the only thing that, in a way, brings us together.”

And although it takes place mainly in the 00 years, “the Persians” is a story with themes that remain relevant today. Mahloudji, who developed this idea in a follow-up email, sees it on our common point.

“Finding freedom is a theme in the book. In our desire to be free, we may have more in common with each other than we have differences, ”she says.

Originally published: April 5, 2025 at 10:30 am Pdt