Jasmin Darznik

There comes a point when the secrets you've kept most hidden become the stories you must tell. I was born in Iran and moved with my family to the U.S. when I was five. Even after earning a PhD in English from Princeton, I never considered becoming an author. But accidentally finding out about my mother's secret life changed that. In 2011, I published my first book, The Good Daughter, which tells the story of how my mother was married at thirteen and forced to give up a child, a half-sister I never knew. That book changed my life. Since then I have been in pursuit of lost or forgotten stories--and the pleasure of disappearing into other worlds through writing.


HOW I STARTED WRITING
I wasn’t supposed to be a writer. Nothing in my first-generation immigrant background supported it, and so much impeded it. Still, I was a reader. As a child I left my small town library with novels stacked up to my chest and under my chin. I’d go home and luxuriate in the possibility of disappearing into different worlds. Beyond that was the twenty-room motel my parents bought when we came to America, a place of struggle and uncertainty. Books were my way out.

But writing? Even as I hacked away at the prohibitions and doubts set down by my family, it still seemed impossible. I was expected to do something practical. When I decided to get a PhD in American literature, as far as my family was concerned it was as if I’d run away with the Grateful Dead. As detours go, it was a useful one. As I read Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on the Road, I found myself profoundly moved by the feeling these writers weren’t just telling me a story—they were telling me who they were.

Having grown up in a family where telling people who you were could be, and often was, regarded as a betrayal, these works were both a revelation and a provocation. That was a beginning, a very important one: to discover voices that spoke to me with an intimacy I rarely experienced in real life.

Still, I might never have crossed over from reading to writing if I hadn’t bumped into my parents’ next-door neighbor one afternoon when I was back home from graduate school. This was about fifteen years ago. We got to chatting and she told me she’d just published a book.

Hold up! I thought. Writing seemed like such an exalted profession. I’d never known a writer in real life. And now, suddenly, I did: the woman next door. Thankfully, I had the presence of mind to ask my neighbor how she’d done it. She told me she’d enrolled in a creative writing workshop through our local independent bookstore, Book Passage, and that’s where she got her start.

That same day I walked over to Book Passage and I signed up for a spot in the writer’s workshop my neighbor recommended. My classmates, mostly women, were strangers to me, people I’d likely never have met in any other context, even though ours was a small community. But once a week, Fridays, 6 to 9 pm, we were kin, bound together by our common love of stories and an urgent, if muted, desire to speak and to be seen.

For two years, I showed up at that workshop every Friday night, pages in hand, heart kicking against my chest as I read for my allotted ten minutes. It was a time of discovery, in some ways the sweetest time of my writing life so far. I wasn’t writing to publish anything, though that might have shimmered as a distant dream; I was wholly taken up by the urge to make something beautiful and to connect with other people.

That’s what got me started, and what keeps me going to this day.