LALEH KHADIVI: (Reading) The weird thing is, I'm more interested in my mother now she's dead - now that I know she had so many different kinds of women inside her. When she first died, I couldn't handle it, and I just wanted to think of her one way. But now, a few months later, I can handle that she was complicated, conflicted.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:
That's a line from Heti, the protagonist of Laleh Khadivi's new novel. She's grappling with things we don't understand about our mothers until they die, or even then. The book, "Female Life On Planet Earth," is full of surprises. And we have Laleh Khadivi with us now to talk about it. Welcome.
KHADIVI: Thank you so much.
ELLIOTT: So Heti's mother has just died, and her aunt is already pressuring her to have a proper gathering to mark a year since her passing in keeping with their Iranian heritage. And about the same time, she gets this mysterious package in the mail. Can you pick up the story there?
KHADIVI: Yeah. The package shows her mother in a completely unfamiliar presentation. Her mom was a very Westernized woman, very liberal, very progressive, single mom, working mom. And in the picture - there are pictures of her mother as a younger woman in her, maybe, early 20s, dressed in a full hijab, which shows a very small portion of the face. And in those pictures, not only is she dressed very strangely, but she's also holding a gun towards other women who it seems like she is arresting or policing. And Heti has to come to grips with this entirely new version of her mother that she didn't know about at all.
ELLIOTT: Now, tell us a little bit more about Heti and her place in the world. You know, she's a mom, a wife, an accountant, a daughter, a niece. She's got a lot going on.
KHADIVI: Yeah. I wanted to really explore the everywoman. I think a lot in literature has been made of the everyman, but not a lot has been written about the everywoman - a person who wakes up in the morning, goes to work, raises a family, has a community of friends, struggles with the things that are hard, enjoys - or tries to - pleasant moments.
And what happens when she begins to try to reconcile these images with the memory she has of her mother is that she gets really distracted by her daily life. She doesn't want to focus on her mother. She doesn't want to solve the mystery of these pictures. She just wants to kind of float from daily activity to daily activity, kind of in a state of grief. But in this floating, she becomes very permeable and open and starts to receive stories that women in her life start to tell her. And these are the stories that help her process the grief and the information about her mother.
ELLIOTT: I'd like to ask you to read a little bit now, if you don't mind, from page 119.
KHADIVI: Sure. (Reading) I think it's just something women do - change. I don't think you can ever really know a woman completely. They change so much. My whole life, my mom was reliable, good to her friends and family, a little strict with me but mostly fair and mostly fun. And though, at another time in her life, she might have been mean, maybe even evil - Heti paused. I just keep thinking. Did I see it? Was there a hint or some kind of clue I could have picked up in my childhood - something of all that other version was still alive in her, in the mother I knew?
ELLIOTT: You know, women, and how women change are very much the core of this story, also what they share with others and what they keep for themselves. Tell me why you wanted to write a book about female agency.
KHADIVI: I think that when I became a mother, I was let into this club that I didn't know existed before. And inside of this club, women are much more willing to become instantly intimate with one another because the act of raising a child is not something a person can do on their own. And there's a huge brain trust that's constantly open between women who are going through various stages of the experience together. And I wanted a book that captured all of that intelligence.
And I think now we're seeing a little bit of it on TikTok or a little bit on Instagram. There are outlets where women can share what they know about parenting or even being a daughter. And I wanted a piece of literature that could kind of get Heti into certain situations where she was receiving intelligence about being a female in a family that's not commonly shared, that's the stuff of maybe book clubs or knitting circles or women sitting around a table with their female families but not really necessarily the stuff of what's considered art.
ELLIOTT: Men barely exist in this book, other than, I would say, maybe to serve as contrast. But you previously wrote a trilogy about men, so this is quite different. Was it a big pivot for you?
KHADIVI: Huge. Absolutely tremendous. When I was writing the trilogy about men, I kind of dropped into a literary drag that I found really enjoyable and was able to expand my imagination into spaces that I had been living in but hadn't really gotten to explore. And then, as I was writing the female perspective, I had a very different approach. It was much more urgent. It was much more kind of being a voice of something that I knew inside of my body, rather than just an imagination.
ELLIOTT: So more personal.
KHADIVI: Far more personal and far more heartfelt.
ELLIOTT: The story unfolds in a series of conversations that Heti has with other women - like, all kinds of women. There's, like, a soccer mom. There's the pregnant courier - just lots of different types of people. And in this way, she is starting to somehow unravel both the mystery of her mother's past and sort of her feelings, right? You have her finding many truths - plural. Why so many?
KHADIVI: I think that many truths are around us all the time. And I feel like Heti has been very blocked off to these truths. She's been living her life, trying to be a good mom to her teenage daughters, trying to be a good daughter, and she hasn't had a lot of time to sort of absorb the meaning of all of this, which I think is true of many busy people. But when her mother dies, women start coming to her with anecdotes, with stories, with histories, and inside of them, she's starting to see, oh, there are a lot of different dimensions to living a life as a woman. And I wanted each woman that she encountered to be a kind of breadcrumb on the trail to understanding her mother.
ELLIOTT: Something that struck me is there were some compelling scenes about sexual expression and sexual power - quite a few for a fairly short book. Why did you want to include those?
KHADIVI: I think that I don't get to read enough books with women having an interesting sort of sexual agency. I also have been thinking a lot recently about the relationship between female sexual power and patriarchal cultures and how threatening it is to have a woman express herself through her beauty or her sexuality. And I wanted the book constantly resurface these themes of sexual power to make readers consider, wait, why is it that a woman who is following her own desire and her own pleasure - why is she threatening to a state or a government?
ELLIOTT: You also use a lot of imagery of the cosmos. What was the inspiration for that?
KHADIVI: Between the trilogy and this book, 10 years passed. And in that 10 years, I had a lot of permutations, including never wanting to write again and quitting my teaching job to go do something administrative. And when I did that, I felt suddenly, a great liberty to stop reading fiction and started reading whatever I want, which ended up being books about physics and astronomy and the spacetime continuum and quarks. And there was something inside of this new information that I was getting that made the human conundrum seem much more interesting to tackle because we are all just in constant relationship with gravity in one way or another.
ELLIOTT: Right.
KHADIVI: And I thought, how nice would it be to place these as the kind of thematic touchstones of a text, while on top of it, all of this, like, cultural, female, bodily society exists. And I found the solidity of science, and especially metaphysics and physics, to be really poetically grounding.
ELLIOTT: Laleh Khadivi's new novel is "Female Life On Planet Earth." Thanks for the conversation.
KHADIVI: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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