Interview: “Bone Worship” Author, Elizabeth Eslami (And Win a Free Book!)

Iranian-American writer Elizabeth Eslami received her MFA from Warren Wilson College in 2003.  Her debut novel, Bone Worship, was published this year by Pegasus Books, and she’ll read at Broadway Books on Tuesday, March 16 at 7 pm. 

We caught up with Elizabeth to talk to her in more detail about Bone Worship…and to give you a chance to win a free copy of the book.  Enter to win by leaving a comment on this post, or by linking back here from your own blog or site.  We’ll choose a winner at random later this week.  (You must be in the U.S. to win.)

Q: Hi! Your novel, Bone Worship, follows the story of Jasmine Fahroodhi, a young Iranian-American woman who’s just dropped out of college and moved back into her parents’ house in small-town Georgia. In time-honored twenty-something style, Jasmine is rudderless, but her father has decided she needs to get married, and he starts arranging for various potential (disastrous) suitors to visit the house.

What interests you about this situation–a parent trying to coerce (or maybe strongly encourage) a child to marry? Particularly in a modern American, post-feminist context, were you concerned about how readers would receive it?

A: When I first fell in love with novels, I was steeped in the Romanticism of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, where you have female protagonists struggling to make the first and sometimes most important decisions of their lives. Often, though, decisions are made for them.

In high school, I bristled at the notion of these capable, self-aware young women having their futures decided by their fathers and suitors, subject to the stultifying expectations of a male dominated society. However, because of the combination of repressed sexuality, the weight of duty and social standing, as well as overwhelming love and honor for family, these novels, for me, offered a deep immersion in a female point-of-view at a moment of extreme emotional conflict, and thus were richly rewarding. I felt the push and pull of their longing.

It didn’t matter if you could see that Jane would end up with Rochester a third of the way in. These writers maintained narrative tension and riveting character development. Some might look at them now as blemished somehow from a post-feminist perspective, but frankly that seems unproductive and irrelevant. These were the conditions at the time, and these women struggled with and against them, however subtly, and sometimes appropriated them. Ultimately they found ways to define themselves within that restrictive world. And, of course, in the case of Flaubert and Tolstoy’s female protagonists, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they refused the world as it was.

In Bone Worship, Jasmine is a modern American woman enjoying luxuries Catherine and Jane could only dream of, and yet she’s not happy. As a student attending the University of Chicago, she is both free to study what she wants and to date whomever she likes. But she feels ill-equipped for this world. In some sense, she hasn’t earned her freedom; she hasn’t experienced the courage of making choices. She has no friends. She’s not sure how to be around boys and men, and when she does take a stab at romance, it blows up in her face. She holds the same idealized views about men that so many Romantic heroines do, and college becomes her place of disillusionment.

Jasmine doesn’t know who she is, chiefly because she doesn’t know anything about her father or her Iranian heritage. So when she returns home without any answers, she does look to her parents, but not for guidance – rather, for information. Who are you, and by extension, who am I, this amalgam of mysteries?

Her passivity towards the idea of arranged marriage shouldn’t be mistaken for acceptance. She’s literally looking at her parents, fresh from this romantic debacle at school, and asking, “So this is how it’s done? Okay, fine. Prove it.” She knows she can walk away, but she’s not going to do that until she gets the information that she came there for.

And for poor Yusef [Jasmine's father], this is his last chance to get it right with his children. His first son abandoned the dream of medical school for an uncertain future of travel, and now he’s left with this wild, scared, confused daughter whom he and his wife can’t control. Marriage is his last ditch effort to give her what he thinks, however childishly, is a stable life for when he’s not around anymore.

I was, and am, concerned about how readers will receive it, particularly the premise. But what I wanted to do was tell the story of a father and daughter struggling to relate, first and foremost, and second, a cross cultural coming-of-age story. This novel does not advocate arranged marriages; if anything, it underscores so much of what modern Americans find ridiculous about them.

And yet it also suggests that, for this young woman striving to understand herself, her heritage, and what it means to fall in love, maybe her parents can teach her something, even if it means simply avoiding the pitfalls of their own union. Bone Worship isn’t the story of a woman who needs a husband to find out who she is. It’s the story of a woman who determines what she loves by embarking on an unexpected career, only stumbling into identity and a romantic relationship along the way.

Q: Jasmine’s father is a mysterious figure, and his life in Iran is a closed book. While he’s focused on finding a husband for Jasmine, she’s using her time at home to try to figure him out. Can you say a little about the relationship between Jasmine and her father — the ways in which it’s strained, the ways in which it may or may not deepen or strengthen through the course of the novel? And how does Jasmine’s mother, Margaret, fit into the picture?

A: From the beginning, even before I created Jasmine and Yusef, I was drawn to the idea of having a protagonist grapple with a profoundly mysterious character. I didn’t want there to be a big revelation at the end that lent itself to the illusion that people are the way they are because of some simple event in their past. I just don’t believe humans are that way.

What’s most interesting to me is, if you try over the course of time to understand someone, and you plumb those mysteries but eventually realize there’s no easy explanation, where do you go from there? My favorite books do this, with one “observer” character, usually the narrator, trying to understand a second, mysterious character, but ultimately to no avail. James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, Norman MacLean’s A River Runs Through It, Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods.

For a writer, the question becomes, how do I create a satisfying trajectory both in terms of character development and plot when the novel’s really just about the struggle? And the answer is that you learn to make things move in little, incremental ways. A conversation over the kitchen table, an unexpected gift. A moment of bonding that gets destroyed by a shocking slight, and then gets repaired, with the scar still showing. Those, to me, are beautiful moments that epitomize how a family evolves.

Yusef is not going to share his past with Jasmine, and when he lets a few details leak out, he stops himself before she can get a complete picture. So she invents a history for him, cobbles it together in the margins of library books. She’s fumbling in the dark toward something, some understanding of him and of herself. In doing so, she’s trying to love him. And when he asks her what library books she’s reading, he’s trying to love her.

There are no grandiose gestures, simply the tiny every day efforts. In the end, I think Jasmine finally realizes this. That she can love her father without unlocking all his secrets, and that he does in fact love her in return, though he is not always able to show it.

Margaret is the wild card, a study in contrasts. She’s as overprotective and over-nurturing as Yusef – she’s a 911 operator, after all, so she’s well versed in how to stop hemorrhaging, literal and figurative – but she’s also Yusef’s opposite. She’s effusive and demonstrative where he’s taciturn and guarded, and she’s a master of denial, always putting on a pretty face. She has seen the ugliness of people and is determined to spare her daughter that knowledge.

Over the course of the novel, her biggest challenge comes when Jasmine makes her realize that she already knows what a cruel place the world is, and that she has ultimately harmed her by trying to protect her. Margaret doesn’t know how to be around a daughter who is actively engaged with the dangers of the world. It’s anathema to her.

Q: Animals figure large in this book, from the title (which refers to how elephants handle the bones of their dead) to how Jasmine, a wildlife biologist, defines herself in the world. Why are animals important to how you told this story? What do they offer the human characters in the book, and the reader?

A: Because the story of the Fahroodhi family takes place in miniature – in the sense that it’s literary fiction; it’s about language and emotion and there aren’t going to be explosions or shoot-outs – I wanted to use contrast as much as possible to contribute to the novel’s dramatic tension. I tried to make the individual characters vastly different from each other and let their similarities be revealed to the reader over time.

The settings, too, Tehran and Arrowhead, are so diametrically opposed. And the idea was to do the same thing thematically. The Fahroodhis live by a code of safety. As a doctor and a 911 operator, they know trauma intimately, and thus, in their home, they want everything safe and sanitized. So, what better contrast to that than the world of animals, the world of wildness and unpredictability?

For Jasmine in particular, interacting with animals means escaping from her abulia, her inability to make a decision. In the beginning, she finds she is better able to relate to animals than humans. Finally, however, they pull her out of her head and offer a future doing something she loves.

For the reader, I hope that some of the animal stories, many of which, like the elephant bone worship phenomenon, are based on field studies and scientific accounts, will resonate. There’s always the risk of anthropomorphizing animals when we think about them. However, maybe that’s not a bad thing. If we have to see animals as furry people in order to care about them, to be interested in them, then so be it. So many of us hold animals, domestic and wild, in the lowest regard, and yet there’s always a tacitly accepted line when it comes to human interests vs. laws against cruelty or laws for conservation. As if to say, yes, but they’re animals and we’re humans. I don’t believe in that line.

Q: You mostly steer clear of politics in the story, but it’s clear that Jasmine’s father was affected by Iranian politics before he moved to the United States. Politics are tied up with the family’s history and with its secrets. What part did you want political history to play in the book? How much do you want the reader to know and understand about Iran’s political situation, and do you see an understanding of it as important to understanding the emotional landscape of the book?

A: That’s a tough question because I very much want readers to take an interest in Iran’s history and its current political situation.  There are some wonderful recent novels by Iranian American writers, Dalia Sofer’s Septembers of Shiraz and Laleh Khadivi’s The Age of Orphans, just to name a couple, that chart the struggles of families in post and pre-Revolution Iran, and I anguished over how much I wanted this novel to be inclusive of the political environment.

However, at its heart, Bone Worship is the story of the daughter of an Iranian immigrant fervently trying to break with his past to start fresh in the United States. Yusef Fahroodhi is determined to keep his past a secret, and my intention was for that deliberate silence to speak volumes. In imagining his past, in piecing it together from fragments of things she’s heard, Jasmine’s history becomes a highly romanticized, outsider’s view of Iran, a place of camels and dusty streets juxtaposed to her father’s actual life in the metropolis of Tehran. It’s a patchwork history, constructed out of a longing for a truth she’ll never learn.

I don’t think it’s necessary for the reader to know a lot about Iran going into the novel. It’s a story about the children of immigrants more than it is about Iranians in Iran. What has amazed me is that as I’ve toured, so many readers have told me that Yusef reminds them of their immigrant parents (of various ethnicities) who have similarly abandoned their pasts, their language and culture. I think that’s very hard for [non-immigrant] American readers to imagine, the notion of forsaking your country forever, and what it would mean psychologically to do that.

Q: I don’t want to give away major plot points, but by the end of the book, Jasmine has reached a kind of detente with her father and started to carve out a place for herself in the world. Writing the book, did you know you were working toward at least a quasi-resolution, or was it possible that things might go right off the rails? Did you entertain any radically different directions for the story?

A: It was always possible for it to go off the rails, even up to the last word! But then, I suppose I’m the one who set the rails in the first place, so I could have moved them as well.

When I started writing the novel, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I almost never do, no matter what I’m writing. The old saw is true for me; the process takes me there. I began by writing the Iran stories. I thought initially that I might be making a story collection, as I had only ever written stories and never a novel, and then I thought it might be a novel-in-stories or a novella.

I was hugely inspired by Sara Suleri’s book Meatless Days, and was aiming toward something similar in form. I was also reading so much of Lorrie Moore at the time, and her narrators often have these wonderfully dark, honest, stripped down ways of seeing the world that I’ve always responded to. I wondered, what was the narrator of “You’re Ugly, Too” like as a college student? What if she happened to be half-Iranian?

So I found Jasmine’s voice, and it was sarcastic but also sometimes very tender and naïve. I knew that I wanted there to be a lot of humor in the book, because so many immigrant novels are very earnest and serious. I don’t think most Americans think humor when they think of Iran, which is unfortunate.

The one thing I knew for sure in terms of the ending was that I didn’t want it to feel neat. I wanted the reader to have journeyed with Jasmine, to have experienced her growth and the new ways she’s come to see her family, but for those messy mysteries to remain. There’s hope in her for the first time, but the uncertainty remains even to the last paragraph.

Q: How was the experience of writing this book? Was it your first finished novel, or do you have other MSS in sock drawers and closets? How long did it take to write? Did you have a writing routine, any particular strategies for discipline? Was it a struggle to find the voice for the book, or did it flow easily?

A: It was bizarre, actually. I didn’t know for a very long time that it was even a book, and then I didn’t know what it would be about, or how it would end, or finally, if it would even be published! Along the way, it was just about playing with language, telling stories in an emotionally evocative style, and flexing my nascent writerly muscles, I guess. Of course, once you’re finished with it, you always see things you wish you could go back and change, but for me, there are still places where I feel it sings, where I can look back and be proud of what I accomplished.

It is my first finished novel, though there are many, many short stories in drawers that will never see the light of day, thankfully! And don’t get me started on the bad poetry hiding somewhere.

From the day I started writing it to the moment the book was released was a little over seven years. I started it as a graduate student at Warren Wilson College and then took it with me to Montana where I worked on it off and on for four years until I had a draft, signed with an agent, and then published it a year and a half later. You really have to have tremendous patience and be in it for the long haul because no matter what anyone tells you, the entire process will take much, much longer than you think.

As far as my writing routine, I set goals of finishing two projects each week. A project can be anything from a chapter of a book to a story revision or a travel piece. It’s easy to get distracted and not meet my own deadlines, but the truth is that I feel like crap if I don’t get my work done. Nothing quite matches the euphoria of finding the rhythm of a story or the voice you need to pull the reader through a piece. In those moments, it hardly feels like work. Unfortunately, though, it’s rare that you stroll through so easily, and the rest of the time it’s all uphill in mud waders! My best strategy is to work on several things simultaneously so that if something really isn’t working, I can switch to a different project.

With the voice for the book, it did come relatively easily, at least during the first years of writing it. I think that was because I was much younger then, so it was almost effortless to tap into a youthful perspective where everything is colored by anger and confusion. In the last years, sometimes I found myself just wanting to hug Jasmine. To tell her I knew how it would turn out, and even though the end was a little bumpy and there would be many, many tears, it would all be okay.