“This is actually the second book I’ve launched in the middle of the pandemic,” says Tahereh Mafi, which, given the length of the pandemic when compared to the writing process, is rather impressive. But such is perhaps to be expected from a rising force in the literary world like Mafi. The Iranian-American writer is the bestselling author of the “Shatter Me” series who made her publishing debut in 2011 when she was just 23. Her first pandemic book, “A Very Large Expanse of Sea,” was released in late March 2020 and was long-listed for the National Book Award. Earlier this summer she released the follow-up, “An Emotion of Great Delight,” and is set to release a book each year through 2024.
Mafi, who lives in Southern California with her husband Ransom Riggs, the author of “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,’” chatted over Zoom on what it’s been like promoting her two books throughout the pandemic and why she’s been inspired to write about the lives of Muslim women in the U.S. post-9/11.
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WWD: What was the origin of the idea for these two novels?
Tahereh Mafi: This book, “An Emotion of Great Delight,” is my second work of realistic fiction. I often struggle to talk about this book without talking a little bit about my first work of realistic fiction. My first work of realistic fiction, “A Very Large Expanse of Sea,” takes place in 2002, and that book follows an Iranian-American Muslim girl in a post-9/11 world. This book, the follow-up, takes place in 2003. It’s a totally different girl, she’s also Iranian-American, wears a hijab, visibly Muslim in a post-9/11 world, but now it’s a few months after the U.S. has officially declared war on Iraq, and the political climate has significantly changed. And so it felt like a follow-up to that book, and yet, they’re not exactly related. It’s just that I approached writing them both from different emotional avenues. “A Very Large Expanse of Sea” was a story about a girl unlearning anger, and “An Emotion of Great Delight” is about a young woman in pursuit of joy. So basically dealing with the grief of being a marginalized person in a world that is extremely bigoted and xenophobic, grieving that experience in different ways.
WWD: What was it like exploring that other side of the same thing, the joy side of it?
T.M.: Complicated, because the book is actually really sad. It’s about a girl who’s trapped in the amber of sorrow, and she is desperately in search of joy. The book is about her pain, and it was difficult to write, because writing a really sad book requires me to live in that headspace as I write it. And I’ve talked a lot about how I’ve written lots of books for young adults, but these are the two that are inspired directly by my own lived experiences. We contain multitudes, we all do, and we are neither entirely angry people, nor are we entirely happy people. We contain gradations of everything, and often simultaneously, but for the purposes of these novels, I wanted to hyper-focus on one major emotional movement, all of which are familiar to me and to the emotional experiences that I’ve had. So it was at once cathartic and extremely uncomfortable.
WWD: What are some of the similarities between what you write about in these two books and what you have experienced as a Middle Eastern woman living in the U.S.?
T.M.: Very specifically, I was a freshman in high school when 9/11 happened, and the horrific events which irrevocably changed the world on a huge macro level, and which simultaneously changed my world on a micro level. I mean, it’s not like it was ever particularly easy to be a very visibly Muslim woman, but after 9/11, suddenly there’s this major spotlight shining on you, and your family, and your community, and your every single movement is now political and controversial, and to be quite honest, terrifying to most people. Just existing in a space was radical; to be visibly Muslim in any public space at that time, it was polarizing, it was difficult. And that definitely shaped my high school years in a way that I never could’ve expected, and as a result, changed me and the person I became.
My first book, “A Very Large Expanse of Sea,” is about a girl who’s navigating this world, but also she’s a teenage breakdancer, and I, too, used to breakdance in high school. So these stories are not just about pain and grief, they’re also about just the basic humanities of long-denied marginalized people, and just the basic idea of humanizing them. I was more than my struggle, I was also just a teenager. I was also just a kid who wanted to live her life and wanted, in my case, to breakdance, wanted to just do my own thing, and was trying to survive high school, and trying to survive all the human tragedies that befall us all, but against the backdrop of a modern war.
With “An Emotion of Great Delight,” post the beginning of the Iraq War, I mean, our mosques were being raided by the FBI, there were undercover FBI agents in our mosque, in our congregation, people we knew that we thought we were really good friends with would turn out to be undercover FBI agents, and almost everybody in our congregation was assigned an FBI agent and were being called and aggressively questioned on a regular basis, being asked to inform on people and to become spies for the government. And it was just a really, really scary time.
WWD: Is your second book specifically timed to this fall’s 20th anniversary of 9/11?
T.M.: No. I didn’t even know that that was coming up. It was just natural, it was how the timing worked out. Because of COVID-19, this book was supposed to come out in 2020, but we pushed it a little, thinking that maybe things could be better in 2021.