My Reading Life: Liquid writer Mariam Rahmani on the books that shaped her

Mariam Rahmani, the author of Liquid: A Love Story, is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in Granta, Gulf Coast, n+1, and more. Her first book-length translation was named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker. Rahmani holds a PhD from UCLA, an MFA from Columbia, and degrees from Princeton and Oxford. She currently teaches at Bennington College.

Her debut novel follows an unnamed Iranian-Indian American narrator who, after struggling to find stability post-PhD, embarks on a meticulously planned mission to “marry rich.” What begins as a whirlwind of absurd and revealing dates across Los Angeles shifts when a family tragedy forces her to confront the contradictions in her life—and question whether the person she’s searching for has been there all along.

Below, the author answered our My Reading Life questionnaire, sharing the books that shaped her, the stories that make her laugh, and what’s currently on her nightstand.

What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?

As a child, I’m not quite sure, but as a teen I fell in love with a copy of Anna Karenina from the used bookstore in town my friends and I used to frequent. It’s illustrated. Rich cream pages under a red fabric cover that’s faded with time and sun, in the Constance Garnett translation I’ve since learned is rather disreputable among translators. (I now translate myself when I can, working from Farsi.) But I still love that book. It lived on the tiny two-shelf bookshelf that served as my bedside table, not far from a copy of The Quran.   

What book helped you through puberty?

Anna, I suppose! I was depressed and a romantic and her tragedy was so beautiful. 

What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?

Oh I hate to be prescriptive about education, but ultimately, I do think reading the classics are worthwhile, whether in English or translation. Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey’s a good bet and maybe some poems by Hafez, if you’re going for impact, whether on the so-called West (via Goethe and other Orientalists) or ‘East.’ I myself had so much fun with Donne, and as much as people don’t seem to like him these days, I don’t think we can throw out Shakespeare, not as English speakers. I would say sacred texts like The Quran and Ramayana, The Bible, all of which I read at that age, but then I think there’s so much miseducation around religion that most teachers don’t have the tools to teach them, and reading them cold isn’t much use. In terms of ideas that shaped our world I’d grab an excerpt from Critique of Pure Reason—for better or worse, I don’t think we ever really exited the Enlightenment. My eighth-grade English teacher made fun of me, catching me with a copy of Pride and Prejudice as leisure reading, but why not? It explains about half of Hollywood’s output, when it comes to romance. 

If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?

Most of the above! Plus, some Rushdie, some Sebald. Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. Comparative translations of the mid-century poet Forugh Farrokhzad’s magnum opus whose Farsi title I’d render, Let Us Trust in the Coming of the Cold Season. Rumi, once I found a translation I liked, maybe the old RA Nicholson versions of some lines alongside various contemporary translations that could be triangulated. There are other living writers whose novels have hooked me—Raven Leilani, Kaveh Akbar, Benjamin Labatut—but I rarely assign what I’ve only read once. (To take this question far too literally!)

What books helped guide you while writing your book?

My book is in conversation with the history of Iranian fiction, and in particular, with the novel considered the first in Farsi, Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl—but I wouldn’t say “guide.” Liquid antagonizes that novel and vice-versa: the conversation is not a dialogue, but rather a debate. The male narrator of The Blind Owl is half-Iranian, half-Indian—Hedayat, incidentally, wrote it while living in India—but (and?) the book trades on a longer history of Iranian Orientalism that racializes India, both fetishizing and demonizing Indian women. As someone who did a PhD on feminist Iranian literature, and grew up reading novels in English and poetry in Farsi—that is, as someone who came to love language in two languages—I wanted to face that history head on. That’s why my narrator is a woman with the same split identity as Hedayat’s character. In other words, that’s why she’s not me. (I myself have two Iranian parents.)

What books are on your nightstand now?

I’m reading The Moor’s Last Sigh for the first time—actually I tried to get some friends to read and discuss it with me, as I do every now and then with a title just to mix things up, but they refused (it’s Rushdie-sized, a brick)—and I just finished listening to Danzy Senna’s Colored Television. I found it hilarious and heartening for how cutting. Before that Gabrielle Zevin had me flying through Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, even though I couldn’t care less about gaming—a testament to how literature exceeds its premise. 

Day to day I’m rereading—very slowly, as I translate—the scholar Farzaneh Milani’s definitive biography of Forugh, which I can’t wait to make available to readers of English. I also reread everything I teach, following my syllabi alongside my students. So soon that’ll mean Forugh, herself, plus—well, I haven’t decided; we’re blissfully on break as I write this. But in the fall it was a whole range of time periods and languages, whether in English by translation or originally, or in Farsi: Alexander Pope, Thomas Swift, Sor Juana, Simin Daneshvar, Goli Taraghi, Tommy Orange, Justin Torres, Edwidge Danticat, Percival Everett, Ghalib, a tiny bit of Ismat Chughtai, a lot of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a play by Chikamatsu. Conrad and Achebe, back-to-back, dueling. It was great. As a writer, reading widely keeps me on my toes.