Jasmin Darznik Reading (Counts as a Literary Event!)

Jasmin Darznik’s Memoir Reveals Her Mother’s Secret Life and a Half Sister in Iran

Jasmin Darznik 

Lexington, Virginia • January 21, 2011

Click here for an audio excerpt read by Jasmin Darznik

Shortly after her father died, Jasmin Darznik was going through some of her mother's papers when she found an old photograph of her mother as a child bride standing next to a man who was not Darznik's father.

"Here was proof of a life my mother had hidden from me," said Darznik. "Who was this man and why hadn't she told me about their marriage?"

Darznik, assistant professor of English at Washington and Lee University, tells the story of her mother's past and the sister who was kept a secret from her in "The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life" (Grand Central Publishing, January 2011).

Initially reluctant to tell her story, Darznik's mother eventually recorded ten cassettes and numerous interviews with Darznik to reveal her life in Iran as a vulnerable girl in an arranged marriage to an abusive husband. She gave birth to a daughter but was later forced to abandon the child in return for a divorce to escape her life of abuse and neglect. She had kept the secret for 30 years because of the stigma attached to a divorced woman in Iran.

She later married Darznik's father and the family lived in Iran until the onset of the Iranian revolution, when they moved to the United States.

Darznik, who was three years old when the family relocated, said that she was proud that she was able to tell a story that hadn't been told before. "It's an unflinching account of divorce, domestic abuse and alcoholism-taboo subjects in Iranian culture and literature-but it's also a story about the fortitude and ingenuity of Iranian women," she said.

Darznik teaches creative writing and literature and said the experience of writing a book has changed the way she approaches the writing of her students. "I understand much better now how difficult it is to begin telling a story. It's one thing to teach writing and quite another to attempt it yourself," she said. "I think writing the book has made me gentler with my students. I know that the kind and attentive reading of friends helped my writing and so that's how I try to approach my students' writing."

Darznik said that she also tries to relay to her students that it's doggedness that gets stories written. "I would sometimes sit for two hours twiddling my thumbs before inspiration came," she said. "It's really that daily plugging in that gets a book finished, that showing up for the task day after day."

The process of writing the book also brought her closer to her mother. "We think we know our mothers only to realize, years later, how very little we in fact understand about their lives," she said. "The mother I knew was fierce, strong and utterly unsentimental, but the revelation of her secret marked the beginning of knowing her more fully and more compassionately. As a teenager and a young woman I had bitterly resented her protectiveness, but I understand now that the surrender of her first daughter totally shaped-I would even say warped-her love for me."

A book reading and launch party for the release of "The Good Daughter" will be held Thursday, Jan 27 at 4:30 p.m. in the Washington and Lee University Elrod Commons, room 345.

"The Good Daughter" is available in the University Bookstore and will be available at Amazon after January 27.