This post was originally published on Audible.com.
Committed to marrying rich, the unnamed Iranian-Indian American narrator of goes on 100 dates with people of all genders over the course of a single summer—which she meticulously logs in a spreadsheet with the hope of securing a marriage proposal by the start of the fall semester. As an accomplished writer, translator, and academic, Mariam Rahmani was perfectly poised to write and perform this buzzy debut that will have you thinking just as much as it’ll have you laughing.
Michael Collina: You’re an accomplished writer and translator, but Liquid is your debut novel. Tell us a bit about your writing process. Did your approach to Liquid feel different compared to some of your other writing endeavors?
Mariam Rahmani: Liquid is the second novel I’ve written, though the first I tried to publish. That first manuscript went through version after version over the course of seven years, and in various contexts that were more or less professionalized—the more being my MFA. At some point I put that book in a drawer, took a month off writing, then felt the itch to get back to fiction. Liquid was born of that energy. The first draft took six or seven months. The process was the same but the speed was different. I’d learned from having done this before, regardless of that first book’s resting in the dark.
You hold a PhD in comparative literature, an MFA in fiction, and have quite the roster of academic institutions on your résumé—much like the protagonist of Liquid. Did your experiences in academia mirror any of the themes and feelings in this novel? Were any of the 100 dates you detailed based on a real-life date of yours?
Her milieu is mine but her identity and trajectory are not—that’s the most basic way to define my relationship to this protagonist. Of course, some of my experiences have trickled into my fiction, but as far as I’m concerned, the way fiction works is to exaggerate. You have to simplify and clarify. Then you can complicate.
In this book, for example, I was interested in how whiteness and brownness can shift based on the context. The narrator is half-Iranian, half-Indian, in reference to the narrator of the first Iranian novel, Sadegh Hedayat’s . She has to deal with distinct forms—and histories—of Orientalism in LA and in Tehran. Except sometimes that “dealing” takes ridiculous forms. She and her dates are not on their best behavior. The dates featured as their own chapters are anonymized and probably should remain so for legal purposes. I was afraid the audiobook would be cheesy. I wanted it to capture the novel’s deadpan tone rather than offer a livelier professional narration. There’s also some minimal Farsi that needs to come across as believably easy for the reader. In terms of being in the booth, I’m not a singer—not even at karaoke—so testing the limits of my voice was fascinating. I had to cancel evening plans because I simply couldn’t stand the idea of talking more after leaving the mic. It was novel and wonderful to have to reorient myself, to think about language in terms of the body rather than the mind.Not needing to name someone is often a form of intimacy; it presumes that you’re already locked in relation to each other. I wanted that intimacy between the reader and narrator.It also helped me create the stranger kind of intimacy I needed as a writer of a first-person narrator who doesn’t share my identity, at least not entirely. I needed access to her interiority as I attempted to represent how a biracial—and also bisectarian, with one Shia and one Sunni parent—Muslim woman might experience the world, what she might have in common with me, and what might be opposed to my own experiences as a Muslim woman born of two Shia Iranian parents. Withholding her name, ironically, forced me to heed the line between her sense of self—her “I”—and myself, my “I.” Naming can be a way of forgetting, and I didn’t want to forget that we were different.Laughs. I listen to a ton of audiobooks. Between my job teaching literature and my writing, I have to read and reread more than I could manage sitting down at my desk. Right now I’m really enjoying an animated reading of Salman Rushdie’s by the voice actor Sunil Malhotra. But I found Elif Batuman’s reading of her two novels, and , was much closer to what I wanted to do here—a funny author reading her own book, and letting the text do the work.
