Some interviewees take a while to warm up, like a car in cold weather. Porochista Khakpour takes off like a hummingbird.
Scarves and skirt swirling, she bursts into Bard’s Shafer Hall, apologizing profusely for being a minute late. By the time we reach Red Hook— a five-minute drive—she’s talked about Shafer’s eccentric design (there’s a moat), the Written Arts Program’s faculty “dream team,” her recent appointment as visiting writer in residence, her other teaching gig at Wesleyan, commuting by Zipcar and train, conversations with cabbies, Manhattan apartments, dog walking, her struggles with Lyme disease, Obamacare, and more. We’ve laughed like old friends. “Off the record” is not on the table.
And before she’s even finished reading the menu at Bread & Bottle, she’s spinning a riveting tale of her stint as a “document mule” for Al Jazeera America, flying to LA to pick up a thumb drive containing the diaries of a high-profile Guantánamo detainee. (The Snowden/NSA story had just broken, she explains, and her editor didn’t trust encryption. So he recruited Khakpour to meet journalist Jason Leopold in a cafè and slip the drive into her purse.) “It was like a spy movie,” she says as a waiter appears. She orders carrot-ginger soup, barely pausing for breath.
True, Khakpour needs to be back on campus in an hour for a student conference, but her high-octane friendliness and dazzling swoops from subject to subject seem to be more about temperament than time pressure. Dark-eyed and slim, she gives an impression of constant motion; it’s no surprise to learn that she’s hypoglycemic and has trouble sleeping. At 37, she’s taught at a dozen colleges, written features and essays for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, Spin, Slate, Salon, Poets & Writers, and the Daily Beast, among others, and published two remarkable novels.
Khakpour’s debut, Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic, 2007), won a California Book Award; The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) earned glowing reviews and a bouquet of quotes from Claire Messud and other notables for its audacious fusion of magic realism, dark humor, and Persian myth.
Zal is born in an Iranian village, the albino son of a demented woman who cages him in an aviary for a decade. Adopted by a doting New York psychologist, the “Bird Boy” struggles to learn human behavior. Aching for normalcy, Zal reaches adulthood on the cusp of Y2K, crossing paths with an outsider artist, her angelic obese sister, and a celebrity illusionist determined to make the World Trade Center vanish. The intricate narrative spirals outward to comment on imagination itself:
“His mind ran away with glorious possibility: that darkly glittering will of the cosmos conjuring through some magical combo of, say, blood, guts, sun, sky, and spirit—and isn’t that how every human being is made anyway? he tried to argue, with whom he did not know. Isn’t that how every story is created?”
Khakpour dips a spoon into her soup, exposing a tattoo above her wrist; she has six. “My students are obsessed with them,” she says, sounding rueful. “I tell them there are more important things than tattoos.” She’s teaching beginning and intermediate writing workshops at Bard, mostly freshmen and sophomores. “I love getting them young. Their imaginations are still wild and crazy— they’re not loaded down yet with boring advice. They’re still kind of pure.”
At Wesleyan, she teaches creative nonfiction, which she calls “my daily work. I’m never not writing an essay on something.” She’s currently finishing a long piece for Harper’s about eccentric billionaire Forest Fenn, who claims to have hidden a treasure chest full of gold coins in the mountains near Santa Fe. “I’m attracted to larger-than-life things, and when you’re that person, those things tend to find you,” Khakpour says. “I tell students they need to live, not just write and read.”
Born in Tehran in 1978, she started writing novels in elementary school. Life had given her ample material: Her earliest memories are of the Iran-Iraq War, “air raids and anti aircraft fire, standing outside a bomb shelter. When I got to the US, I would panic at anything in the air—hot air balloons, helicopters. I was like this wartime kid.”
Her younger brother was born in South Pasadena. “My childhood was the transition between cultures,” Khakpour explains. “My parents were really upper-middle-class—no, just upper-class, the 1 percent of Iran. They lost everything. So my brother and I grew up being poor and scrappy, but our mother was crying about not going shopping for winter clothes in Milan anymore.”
She paints herself as a tomboy, a nerdy outsider “learning English on the kindergarten playground. I was pretty much depressed at five. The arts really saved my life.” She’s not sure how the urge to write seized her so early. “The only book I ever saw my mother read was The Bridges of Madison County.” Her math professor father “found art too emotional. He didn’t trust it. I had aunts who were very creative.” Khakpour pauses. “Maybe it was the ultimate act of rebellion.”
As soon as she could, she moved east. In an essay for Sari Botton’s anthology Never Can Say Goodbye, Khakpour describes her “coming of identity” as a scholarship student at overwhelmingly white Sarah Lawrence College. Restlessly sampling different wardrobes, music scenes, and sexual identities, she studied literary theory by day and the Manhattan club scene by night. “I would purposely miss Metro-North home so I had to stay out all night in the city,” she recalls. “New York was my real education.”
In a 2010 New York Times op-ed, Khakpour describes what sealed her identity as a New Yorker: “Every aspect of my life is shadowed by what I saw through the glass that blue-and-gold Tuesday morning: two towers, each gashed and stunningly hazed in the glitter of exploding windows, falling, one after the other, over and over again.”
A frequent commentator on political issues, she pronounces herself “gutted” by the Republican gains in the midterm elections. “The US is turning into the Islamic Republic of Iran. The anxieties the fundamentalist mullahs have are the same anxieties conservatives have here. They want to turn America into a crazy religious state, to strip rights from women. When you’ve left a fundamentalist Islamic culture, you want a free liberal culture.”
Does she feel pressure to speak for her expat community? “I’m not called on to represent Iranian-American culture,” Khakpour says. “What I write is not what they want to read. By being Other to a lot of communities, I’ve been able to do my own thing. That’s very liberating.” She adds, “But I do write a lot about immigrants and as a Middle Eastern woman. I’m more comfortable with those looser identities.”
Nevertheless, her detailed portrait of Iranian-American immigrant life in Sons and Other Flammable Objects pushed some family buttons. “At first I would tell them not to read my work, but it’s actually helped our relationship. It forced them to accept who I am,” Khakpour says. “Once it’s out there, you’re done. It’s like coming out.”
Her parents are proud of her success, although, she reports, “my not being married is scandalous.” Engaged at one point, she “made a conscious choice not to have a family and kids. When I envisioned what my life was going to be like, as a very young child, this is what I wanted: a life of writing and books.”
“I’m fine with being alone, despite the clingy feeling I had about relationships in my 20s. I never want that again.” Khakpour smiles. “So much despair falls off as you get older. I’m happy being with my dog.”
She’s currently writing a memoir about her battle with late-stage Lyme disease and addiction to prescription drugs for its psychological symptoms. “I spent a lot of my first book advance on fancy doctors prescribing more and more drugs for insomnia and depression. When Heath Ledger died, he was on a very similar cocktail,” she says darkly. “I’ll never forgive those doctors.”
She’s also finishing her third novel, an irreverent spinoff of Little Women, “a book I hated, except for Jo.” Despite her debut novel’s breakout success, Khakpour had trouble publishing The Last Illusion. “People were terrified of 9/11—a Middle Eastern woman writing about 9/11.” One editor told her, “This is the wrong second novel for you,” suggesting she write about Iranian-American women instead.
Bristling, Khakpour started a book about the four daughters of a mega rich Iranian-American snack food entrepreneur living in LA’s glitzy “Tehrangeles.” It began as “a complete parody of what they were telling me I should write, but then I got interested in it,” she says.
“I try never to throw anything away. I try to problem-solve and make things work. I don’t believe in this macho of killing your darlings, or setting goals or word counts. I don’t write every day. But I read every day. I would rather be dead than not read every day, but writing? I could totally live without it. I wish I could live more every day. I wish I had time for more adventures.” Porochista Khakpour gazes out at the sky. “But if you write novels, you have to sit still sometimes and be in a room. It’s my biggest challenge.”
This article appears in December 2014.
