For Iranians, it’s an epic like the Old Testament meets The Canterbury Tales meets The Odyssey.

In a way, they’re old friends: “In America, my father read me stories from the Shahnameh. She’s proud of it, feels affection for her characters and has three feathers tattooed on her hand in homage to its chief protagonist, Zal: “All the characters are to some extent versions of me, but I’ll never love a character as much as Zal.” Her autobiographical first novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007), was published “when I was sorting out my issues with my parents, which is maybe why I felt it came out too soon.” The Last Illusion took two years to find a publisher, with editors nervous about its magical realist take on 9/11. She compliments my “great questions” and, whether this flattery is designed to endear or not, it succeeds. She’s serious about her work, self-effacing in a way only a confident person can be, revealing that she abandoned “flashy post-9/11 consciousness ideas” for novels, including one about Osama Bin Laden’s ex-girlfriend.

Sitting opposite me in a claustrophobic basement meeting room at her publisher’s offices, she attributes her huskiness to a cold and hangover: “I don’t usually speak in this Long Island, Lindsay Lohan voice.” She’s good company, as stimulating discussing William Faulkner as decrying the depressing phenomenon of normcore. Her speech is a rapid, less lyrical cousin of her vigorous prose. It was the same instinct as taking photographs.”

I thought: ‘These are the survivors, the ones who got out.’ Later, as my boyfriend drove us to his mother’s house upstate, I started making notes. When I got downstairs people were running but I remember a group of businessmen, completely white with dust, wearing hysterical expressions of joy. There was deep anguish in me and I suspected it had to do with leaving Iran.”įast forward to 11 September, 2001, when Khakpour, by then an unemployed writer, was living in lower Manhattan: “Watching the Twin Towers come down from my apartment half a mile away, I couldn’t believe how quiet it was. I became a storyteller out of that sense of responsibility.” The family settled in Los Angeles when Khakpour was six, although perhaps “settled” is the wrong word: “I felt like an outsider. My parents were constantly panicking and crying, so I felt my role was to entertain them. “I remember leaving, stopping in Turkey, France, a nunnery in Switzerland. “I remember anti-aircraft missiles, bomb shelters, men praying on rooftops,” she says. She was only three years old at the time, but Porochista Khakpour has clear recollections of fleeing Iran with her family in 1981.

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