I hope my last post didn’t make anyone think I’m on the brink of flinging myself into oncoming traffic (because a precariously employed Type-A is essentially tragedy waiting to happen). If there’s any truth to my life, it’s that things always end up working out. Tonight, that half-full glass comes in the form of Azar Nafisi.
I first encountered Nafisi in my first year of university, when the spine of her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran caught my attention from a packed bookcase at Milwaukee’s Broad Vocabulary bookstore. I had only just read Lolita myself, which had left enough of an impression to keep me submerged in a state of dreamy fangirl veneration for at least the following year, so even though I knew nothing about anything (and even less about Iran), I was sure I needed this book.
I plowed through Nafisi’s account of clandestine book club meetings in one sitting and immediately decided that she would be my new hero. The timing was perfect: my recently handwritten four-page fan letter to my childhood role model, Madeleine L’Engle , had gone unanswered (I had no way of knowing, but she was in the clutches of dementia at the time), so I was ready for an upgrade.
While the transition from 18 to 19 isn’t quite a leap from innocence to adulthood, for me it marked the difference between a time when it seems appropriate to pen hyperbolic confessionals to your literary role models and one in which you respect their work from a measured distance. Maybe this is the reason I never bombarded Azar Nafisi’s literary agent with a slew of emails until the poor, defeated soul relented with a contact address for my stalking convenience. Still, I can’t help but imagine how my 19-year-old self would react if she knew I was about to see Azar Nafisi, in the flesh, as a rookie Toronto journalist five years down the line. She’d probably look in the mirror and breathe a sigh of relief.
I hope my last post didn’t make anyone think I’m on the brink of flinging myself into oncoming traffic (because a precariously employed Type-A is essentially tragedy waiting to happen). If there’s any truth to my life, it’s that things always end up working out. Tonight, that half-full glass comes in the form of Azar Nafisi.
I first encountered Nafisi in my first year of university, when the spine of her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran caught my attention from a packed bookcase at Milwaukee’s Broad Vocabulary bookstore. I had only just read Lolita myself, which had left enough of an impression to keep me submerged in a state of dreamy fangirl veneration for at least the following year, so even though I knew nothing about anything (and even less about Iran), I was sure I needed this book.
I plowed through Nafisi’s account of clandestine book club meetings in one sitting and immediately decided that she would be my new hero. The timing was perfect: my recently handwritten four-page fan letter to my childhood role model, Madeleine L’Engle , had gone unanswered (I had no way of knowing, but she was in the clutches of dementia at the time), so I was ready for an upgrade.
While the transition from 18 to 19 isn’t quite a leap from innocence to adulthood, for me it marked the difference between a time when it seems appropriate to pen hyperbolic confessionals to your literary role models and one in which you respect their work from a measured distance. Maybe this is the reason I never bombarded Azar Nafisi’s literary agent with a slew of emails until the poor, defeated soul relented with a contact address for my stalking convenience. Still, I can’t help but imagine how my 19-year-old self would react if she knew I was about to see Azar Nafisi, in the flesh, as a rookie Toronto journalist five years down the line. She’d probably look in the mirror and breathe a sigh of relief.