Afarin Majidi’s memoir Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror is a history of hurt. It is also a remarkable testament to overcoming.

In 1979, upper middle-class Iranian women like Afarin Majidi wore French fashions and perfume, smoked in public and generally enjoyed the same social freedoms as western women. Iran was then a kingdom, ruled by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – the Shah of Iran.

The kingdom to which the Shah was heir was 2,500 years old. It began with the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC) which stretched from Anatolia and Egypt across western Asia to northern India and Central Asia. It was then the largest and most powerful empire the world had ever seen. Two-and-a-half millennia later, in 1967, the Shah proclaimed himself ‘King of Kings’ (his other titles included ‘Light of the Aryans’). Vanity aside, Mohammad Reza Shah had some reason to boast – he was responsible for modernizing his country’s industry and military and for instituting economic and social reforms. He achieved this by championing liberal Western ideals and values. But he was widely viewed as a puppet of America and the CIA and as a vain despot who lined his own pockets while putting American interests first. His feared secret police – SAVAK – brutally repressed domestic dissent.

Afarin’s uncle was Minister of Development under the Shah; her father was a civil servant in his government. Her father was not political, but her uncle was third in command, just below Prime Minister Hoveida. In 1978, the embattled Shah threw Uncle Magdid in prison in an unsuccessful bid to appease the revolutionaries intent on deposing him. Uncle Magdid escaped from prison; the Shah left Tehran in January 1979, never to return. The 2,500-year-old Persian monarchy which the Shah was bent on refashioning as ‘The Great Civilization’ had come to an end.

In February 1979, Afarin, her brother, three sisters and her parents escaped with just the clothes on their backs. They left Tehran as upper middle-class Iranians and landed in Newark as immigrants – foreigners – their economic status much-reduced. In 1980 her cousin Ali Reza, who had just begun his studies at Boston College, was stabbed to death in the street. Before killing him, his murderer called him a ‘hostage taker’ (a reference to the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis). The killer could have had no way of knowing that Ali Reza loathed the Ayatollah and all he stood for. ‘Ali Reza’s murder made us all feel unsafe,’ Afarin writes. For many Americans, all Iranians are the same. It was like that then, and it’s especially like that now and has been since 9/11.

Afarin explains that her mother began drinking heavily and she developed insomnia, holding her breath at night, trying to empty her mind to imagine what it feels like to be dead. She had nightmares about her father digging in their new back yard, ‘burying gold and piles of faceless dead people’.

From the start of her memoir, we are aware of the profound (and quite literal) sense of alienation experienced by Afarin. She falls into one abusive relationship after another with American men. One of the remarkable qualities about this memoir is that she does not gloss over this. She describes a string of abusive relationships, and the reader can feel the sheer weight of them and the misery she endured.

In autumn 2003 she begins to attend a writing workshop taught by the British author James Lasdun. She is 31, he is 45. She is attracted to him and she to him. Two years later, while working at Rolling Stone magazine, she writes, she was drugged and raped by colleagues. She delays reporting it to the police (she was worried she might be fired from her job.).

Afarin gets back in touch with Lasdun six months after the assault. He offers to assist with her novel about the Iranian revolution, introducing her to his agent and an editor, the famous Joyce Johnson. This does not go well with Johnson telling her to change her story entirely.

Soon, Afarin goes off the deep end. She moves from Brooklyn to Orange County, CA. To say things go pear-shaped after this is an understatement. She falls into a deep depression, interspersed with bouts of mania. She thinks she is pursued by secret police. She smells poison gas everywhere and attempts to make everyone she meets aware of it (“I pounded on all the front doors, yelling for everyone to get out’ is a regular occurrence.”). She stops washing (“I refused to shower, believing the water was laced with the same poisonous gas I was already breathing.”). She is evicted from one apartment after another. The fantastic and the real are delivered in the same breaths.

After the police are called to intercede during a visit with her parents that goes badly wrong, Afarin’s sister brings her to a hospital emergency room where she is sedated then sent to a psychiatric facility. She is hospitalized for two weeks and diagnosed as bipolar. After a simple adjustment of medication she regains her perspective and is released.

When she learns that she has ‘acted out’ towards James Lasdun, she is mortified. She wrote him angry emails, published spiteful reviews of his work on Amazon and other platforms and said that ‘his wife’s cunt smelled of dead rabbits. She writes him a sincere apology for her ‘horrible behavior’. She does not retract her judgment of Lasdun as a sexist who fetishizes his female characters, especially ones of colour, of whom Afarin feels – not all that surprisingly – herself to be one.

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In 2013 James Lasdun published his memoir Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. The text of this book was assembled from abusive and threatening emails that Afarin (who is called ‘Nasreen’ in Lasdun’s account) wrote to him after she had lost her mind. The emails were viewed by Lasdun and his publisher as explosive, revelatory and interesting enough to merit publication.

Not surprisingly Afarin’s hate mail, on its own, was too thin to sustain a complete narrative. So the author and his publishers decided to make a book that was plumped out with several loosely-connected parallel narratives. Lasdun works in these seemingly disparate themes to assemble a text of adequate length to make a book.

Afarin’s prose is tough, unrelenting and always on target. Her account of being given the run around by New York agents is heart-breaking. Everyone saw her potential, but no one was prepared to cut her a break – especially not after Lasdun called her a stalker. After the racism, sexual abuse, and actual rape it is perhaps not surprising that Afarin’s career is brought to a halt before it can get started. Afarin’s hate mail was evidence of her madness, of her suffering. It also gave Lasdun, whose career was in the doldrums, a nearly ready-made book.

But Lasdun does not stop there. He writes a novel about Afarin, accusing her possibly lying about everything under the sun. Shameful.

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These two memoirs are parables – perhaps more like cautionary tales – for the digital age. Afarin’s book is self-published but will be immortalized despite Lasdun cajoling every agent against working with her. Her reviews of Lasdun that he found offensive were published on the Amazon readers’ reviews page and were eventually taken down at Lasdun’s request. Lasdun’s book had the benefit of a major publisher’s advance and the publicity budget to go with it. The key textual element of Lasdun’s memoir is emails sent to him by Afarin, which are the backbone of it – her gift to him.

As a ‘public person’ it is difficult sometimes to let go of our amour propre in the digital age. ‘Nasreen’ says it best: ‘Your reputation is ass.’
Reading these two books side by side is an unsettling experience. The lasting impression is of Goliath prevailing over David.