This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mariam Rahmani, whose debut novel, Liquid: A Love Story, is out today from Algonquin Books. The novel tells the story of a young Muslim scholar, stuck in the mire of adjunct professorship in Los Angeles, who decides to give up her career in academia and marry rich, committing herself to one hundred dates in the course of a single summer. By midsummer, reality hits, and the narrator relocates to Tehran. Justin Torres praises the book for “hilariously tearing through the faux-profundity of so many of our cultural fixations—from Los Angeles, to academia, to rom-coms,” and for its deft move to Tehran, where the novel “slowly morphs into a touching examination of vulnerability, dislocation, grief, and longing.” Mariam Rahmani is a writer and translator. Her fiction and essays have appeared in publications such as Granta, New York magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Image magazine, and her translations in n+1, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. Liquid is currently being translated into Dutch and Croatian.
1. How long did it take you to write Liquid: A Love Story?
Six or seven months for a first draft. Another nine to revise and sell. Three years from start to finish, page one to pub.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Writing about sex. Or maybe structure? Both are hard!
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
First thing, as far as work goes but after a long morning routine including exercise and a quiet coffee as I read. I never write after lunch. If the morning goes by without writing for one reason or another—right now, ironically, the reason is this book, as the hustle and bustle of publication has been keeping me from another novel I started a year and a half ago, and to make peace with the chaos I’ve turned to translation—that day is lost.
How often? I aim for four days a week and occasionally hit five. I never try to write on the weekend, though when pressed—I think most writers and all academics need to take more time off than they do—I may get other work done on a Sunday.
Where: Right now I’m privileged enough to have a proper desk and home office because I moved to the woods. But my life was much more chaotic for most of Liquid. I wrote the book sitting at my dining room table in a one-bedroom in L.A., trying to drown out my partner’s phone calls as he went about his workday ten feet away. I edited it bouncing between New York, L.A., and the Berkshires for either his work or mine.
4. What are you reading right now?
Salman Rushdie’s The Moor Last Sigh (Random House, 1995) and Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (Penguin Press, 2023). Both incredibly slowly. Soon, once more—actually twice more, because I’m teaching two different translations—Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, alongside my students. Actually, thrice more as I’ll need to do my due diligence and reread the original Farsi.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I honestly don’t have such eclectic tastes. The other week I said I was reading James (Doubleday, 2024) by Percival Everett and that got a laugh, so maybe I think recognized authors should be more often read.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Teaching. Which really means making money and having healthcare, because I love teaching, I just wish I could focus on one class at a time.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
“I don’t know how to advise you.” From my agent—and I do realize this question has a more positive spin, but that’s honestly what came to mind.
We had some squeaky wheels trying to sell this book—it went out once, then the second time was grabbed on a preempt—and during that first round my agent claimed she’d never seen an author get asked to take so many meetings without an offer. We took a beat and tried again but I found that comment striking; she’d been around the block. You had to wonder where the hesitation lay.
Based on my experience as a translator I think there’s a lot of conservatism when it comes to Iran—people don’t know what to think. It’s unfamiliar. Martyr! (Knopf, 2024) by Kaveh Akbar hadn’t come out yet.
At the time, I found it depressing and infuriating that a book written in English by an American—my manuscript, that of someone born and raised in the so-called Heartlands—was facing the same obstacles I had to overcome trying to place the Iranian novel I’d translated a few years prior. But of course for the same reasons it wasn’t the first time I found myself in some sort of sticky web of subtle, sophisticated xenophobia or Islamophobia or whatever it was that had us all trapped—not just me but everyone involved, as I don’t think anyone was ill-intentioned, and those particular editors were wonderful; the issue was, is, way bigger than that—so I had to do what a lot of writers do: Suck it up, work harder, keep at it.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Liquid: A Love Story, what would you say?
Chill out.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Liquid: A Love Story?
Being a kind of failed academic, by which I mean doing a “scholarly” PhD in comparative literature and lecturing at UCLA. Learning how to draw liquid eyeliner. Going out in L.A. Becoming a translator.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Superlatives make me squirm—I hedge too much. But a few options:
“Stay in the middle.” Richard Ford said that in response to a student question when I took a class with him about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and it made no sense to me. I was writing my first (unpublished) novel and I’d gone through draft after draft over the course of six years—in the end it’d be another one for a total of seven before I put it aside. I started writing Liquid then sold Liquid, and my first taste of the publishing process—of all that goes into a book to package it as a commercial object—made me realize what he meant. The magic happens in the writing, on the page. That’s the high.
The other two pieces of advice I received in my MFA—my only real exposure to “creative writing” as such before my current job, given I’d only taken one or two workshops, didn’t start reading contemporary fiction until more or less my thirties, and the earlier stuff was stuff I had to read in Farsi for my PhD—that stuck with me were less riddled. One was Binnie Kirshenbaum not even really giving advice, just observing, “But your style is your fingerprint.” I was writing these long, winding sentences and under a lot of pressure to change them in the workshop (not her workshop)—her words snapped things back into focus: If I wanted to write like that I would, until I didn’t. (At some point I didn’t: Liquid is more readable, though really a lot of it is long, winding sentences pointlessly broken up by periods rather than commas. Which I guess makes it more palatable?)
Finally, Paul Beatty told the senior thesis workshop I was in, rather simply, do better. He probably said it kindlier than that, but his point was clear, and it was a wonderful kick in the ass.