Deep Patience
Tenacity Tales: Marjan Kamali on working through the silences of creativity
Our October Tale is Marjan Kamali, author of Together Tea (2013) and The Stationery Shop (2019), and—coming July 2, 2024—The Lion Women of Tehran.
The morning I was scheduled to meet Marjan Kamali for lunch to talk about the role tenacity has played in her writing, my novel revision was giving me fits.
Specifically the umpteenth version of my opening chapter.
In theory, I knew exactly what the chapter needed—I had a revision plan after all. In practice, though, the chapter had no pulse, and I was struggling to find the best cocktail of voice, character, and foreshadowing to jumpstart its heart. Which is why, when I met Marjan for lunch later that afternoon and she asked how my novel was going, I groaned.
“The opening chapters are kicking my ass,” I told her1. “I know the answer’s in the fog somewhere, but it just hasn’t lifted yet, if that makes sense.”
“Unfortunately, it makes complete sense, yes,” Kamali said.
Then we shared a tired laugh.
Marjan Kamali is the author of The Stationery Shop, an international best-selling novel, and Together Tea, a Massachusetts Book Award finalist. Her third novel The Lion Women of Tehran will be published in July, 2024. In 2022, she was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and she’s currently a scholar in Residence at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.
Even with the truncated bio above it’s clear that Kamali has known terrific success, and yet she’s also known writing days so terrifically frustrating they drove her to tears.
“People say there’s no crying in baseball, and maybe that’s true, but there’s a lot of crying in writing,” Kamali says. “So. Much. Crying.”
If you’re familiar with Kamali’s work, you’d be forgiven for wondering if her tears—happy and sad—were shed for her characters. Born in Turkey to Iranian parents, Kamali has penned three novels that center characters actively grappling with the dual-existence of being both Iranian and American:
Together Tea tells the story of Darya and her 25-year-old daughter Mina, who are comedically at odds about the merits of Darya’s heroic and sometimes comedic efforts to find Mina a husband—there’s a spreadsheet—but who ultimately brave the crucible of the mother’s heartbreak in 1978 Iran to come to a more nuanced understanding of each other.
The Stationery Shop is a heartfelt story about Roya, an Iranian woman who has been living in America for more than fifty years with a husband she adores only to be given the opportunity to come face to face with a boy she was engaged to be married to more than sixty years before but who vanished during the Iranian coup d'état the night before their wedding.
And according to the recent Publisher’s Marketplace announcement, The Lion Women of Tehran is “set against the fight for women’s rights in Iran from the 1950s to 1980s, about two friends whose bond is ruptured one night due to an inadvertent act of betrayal, and who, decades later, reunite in America to discover the truth about that fateful time.” See the sneak peek of the beautiful cover design below:
But the tears Kamali copped to spilling over lunch weren’t the result of heartbreak caused by her plots2 so much as the heartbreak caused by the demands of the craft it took to tell them.
With The Lion Women of Tehran, Kamali wrote 150 pages about suburban mothers before she realized she was more interested in the Iranian woman running the coffee shop than the characters frequenting it. So, she chucked those 150 pages and started writing a book about that shop owner and the friend who inadvertently betrayed her decades before.
With Together Tea, Kamali spent years focusing on the daughter exclusively only to realize that the story was really about the daughter, her mother, and the relationship between the two. Kamali had to rewrite the book by weaving in the mother’s side of the story.
With The Stationery Shop, Kamali had dreamed up a lost love plot where lovers Roya and Bahman exchange letters after Bahman disappears, but for months Kamali had no idea why Bahman went missing.
“I had to be willing to go to bed not knowing why he disappeared and get up the next morning not knowing why he disappeared and keep trying to puzzle it out,” Kamali said. “People always say you have to be tenacious about your career, and that’s true, but tenacity so often means sticking with writing a book whose plot is indecipherable to you or sticking with a chapter that feels overwhelming or even sticking with a character whose soul you fail to understand for months—years!—on end.”
And, Kamali says, there’s truly no short cut.
“When I was having trouble deciding whether a [different character in The Stationery Shop3] lives or dies, a friend told me to put the question under my pillow and I’d wake up in the morning and know the answer, so I tried it. I wrote the question down, I put the paper under my pillow, and when I woke up in the morning…I still had no clue! Of course, I didn’t! I had to really sit with the question and think about it and read all the hidden clues I’d left for myself. I’d written about a blast. I’d written about someone falling at her feet. I felt like Columbo piecing together that yes [this person4] had to die.”
But what does it mean to actually sit with a literary uncertainty in a story you’re longing to tell? What does that look like at the writing desk?
Some days it looks like tears of frustration, Kamali says.
Some days it looks like staring at the white board in her office and willing inspiration to strike.
Some days it looks like scribbling in notebooks to audition possible solutions with no one but her and her fickle muse to bear witness.
And some days it looks like taking a break to let the idea steep, whether that means focusing on some other section of the novel—going over and over and over her first chapter is one of Kamali’s favorite productive breaks—or pushing away from the desk entirely to focus on her life off the page for a while.
“Writing requires a deep patience,” Kamali says. “I think a lot of people are not willing to acknowledge that writing needs that, but it does. You have to be patient with yourself. You have to be patient with your story. You have to be patient with your characters.”
While teaching a class full of writers who didn’t really understand what she meant by deep patience, Kamali demonstrated it for them. In a natural lull in the class—the kind of lull the teacher would normally fill—Kamali stayed quiet.
The class fidgeted, but Kamali stayed quiet.
The class started to exchange glances, but Kamali stayed quiet.
Kamali only broke her silence once the class became noticeably antsy: “Was that uncomfortable?”
The class laughed nervously and agreed that it was.
“Because that’s what it takes to write,” she told them. “You have to be willing to push through the silences of your creativity until you figure out what you want and need to say. You have to sit with your characters and figure out what they’re trying to tell you because chances are it’s a message you need to hear. You have to be willing to resist the easy answers to reach for the answers that are less comfortable. Those are the answers that teach you something.5”
But even thought Kamali’s writing process is something of a gauntlet for her heart and soul, she insists that writing is a privilege worth a few tears.
“Find a way to love the writing,” she says. “Because it’s the writing that transforms you. You begin the book as one person and you complete the book as another because of all you went through to write it. You’re never transformed by the selling of the book. You’re not transformed by readers reaching out to you after the book is out. Those feel good, sure, but it’s the writing that transforms you.”
The opening paragraphs of TOGETHER TEA
Mina was half-asleep when her mother, Darya, called to say that she’d found the perfect gift for her twenty-fifth birthday. “His name is Mr. Dashti,” Darya said, almost breathless on the phone. “Two degrees, a PhD and an MBA. He’s a descendent of the third cousin of Reza Shah. He lives in Atlanta. Has perfect health. The nicest teeth. He’ll be here on Sunday afternoon for tea and questions. Please, Mina. No tricks this time. I’ve done the numbers. And where the lavender dress with your new belt.”
Mina put down the phone and slid back under the covers. Another potential husband. Another Sunday afternoon spent nodding at a strange man, wiht her parents in their best clothes, aiming to please. She didn’t want to get married. She wanted to quit business school and move to the mountains to paint all day. But she had to prepare for her Operations Management exam.
Mina forced herself up and went to the kitchen. She boiled water and then brewed tea the way Darya had taught her, balancing the teapot on top of the open kettle so that steam from the boiled water underneath would gently simmer the leaves. She covered the teapot with a cloth so no heat could escape. Half Earl Grey, half mystery leaves. Darya’s brew.
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The opening paragraphs of THE STATIONERY SHOP
“I made an appointment to see him.”
She said it as if she were seeing the dentist or a therapist or the pushy refrigerator salesman who had promised her and Walter a lifetime guarantee of cold milk and crisp vegetables and unspoiled cheese if only they would buy his brand-new model.
Walter dried the dishes, his gaze on the kitchen towel and its print of a yellow chick holding an umbrella. He didn’t argue. Walter Archer’s penchant for logic, his ability to let reason trump all, was a testament to Roya’s own good judgement. For hadn’t she married a man who was reasonable and, my goodness, unbelievably understanding? Hadn’t she, in the end, not married that boy, the one she had met so many decades ago in a small stationery shop in Tehran, but lassoed her life instead to this Massachusetts-born pillar of stability? This Walter. Who ate a hard-boiled egg for breakfast almost every single day, who said as she dried the dishes, “If you want to see him, then you should. You’ve been a bit of a wreck, I’m afraid.”
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Tenacity Tales is HIBOU’s monthly celebration of the tiny tenacities in a writerly life. If you have a tenacity tale you’d like to share, comment below or send me your pitch at hibou@substack.com. To learn more about what we’re looking for, read the original Tenacity Tale here.
We know each other from years together in the Boston literary scene.
Though there were some of those…
Kamali actually used the name, but SPOILERS!
Once again, the name has been redacted because SPOILERS!
So what have Kamali’s novels taught her? “Ultimately I’ve learned the same lesson from all three,” Kamali says. “That love outlasts loss.”
I saved reading this until I could really read it and now speed through, and I'm glad that's what I did. There is so much wisdom in this piece. And how could there not be, when it's you two?
Such great insight and comfort to know that if Marjan Kamali has had to work through creativity silences, there is no shame when I experience them. My book club and I loved The Stationary Shop! Looking forward to her new novel too.