- Share via
I first met the writer, scholar and translator Mariam Rahmani 10 years ago in a diner in Brooklyn, N.Y., where we were introduced by our friend, Emma. We were both about to give up New York for L.A., and so we chatted about our expectations and anxieties — a kind of friendship blind date, a meet cute.
Recently, I was talking to Mariam at Book Soup, as part of her book tour, and I brought up this diner meeting, which I’ve always remembered as a roseate beginning to a deep and lasting friendship. “Actually, we didn’t get along at first,” she told the audience, to much laughter, and much to my surprise. Then, after the event, walking to the bar, Emma confirmed Mariam’s take, “No, you definitely didn’t. And it wasn’t a diner.” If I have a terrible memory, and an apparent tendency toward folksy nostalgia, Mariam does not. She is sharp, clear-eyed and always so fashionable.
Mariam brings all that style, wit and brilliance to “Liquid: A Love Story,” a novel that cleaves itself in two. The first half takes place in Los Angeles, driven by a narrative voice that is at turns sardonic, hilarious and yearning. The premise — marry rich or die trying — is handled so intelligently and schematically (the narrator keeps track of her dates and prospects in an Excel spreadsheet), that it’s a bit of a shock when the book moves to Tehran in the second half and the scheming, the wry tone, the romantic comedy of it all, seem to slip away and our too-knowing narrator finds herself adrift, vulnerable and grieving. The structural bifurcation of the novel is a bold choice, and all the more rewarding for its boldness. Indeed, this seems to be one of the major themes of the novel — from the willing, or willful, division of the self into mind and body; to the division of secure and insecure academic labor; to overdetermined notions of East and West. Perhaps the most apt metaphor for a book set in Los Angeles and Tehran is to simply say, “Liquid” is a book troubling the fault lines.
Justin Torres: I read this a while ago when it was in rawer form, and now I have this beautiful hardback. It’s a very L.A. book, isn’t it?
Mariam Rahmani: It really is! It’s also a book in which I was interested in drawing the parallels between L.A. and Tehran. There’s meant to be a lot of continuity between the two, like the specificity about the cars — L.A. is a driving city, obviously, but so is Tehran. There’s the stuff about the light, the fact that they’re both dry, even though one is on the ocean, and one is not near water. In a lot of ways, I always saw the book as a love letter to L.A., but it’s also meant to tap into the part of L.A. that’s not quite Tehrangeles, but this ghost of Tehran that haunts L.A., because of all of the expats.
JT: You’re from the Midwest originally. Did you know about Tehrangeles, or about how many expats were here, and did you always want to make it here? Or is it just an accident of history that you ended up in Los Angeles?
MR: No, I had no interest in the West Coast. I grew up in a really conservative Iranian community that’s not the L.A. expats at all. Of course, we knew about it, it was this cultural touchstone, but it was also a kind of city of sin. And then, when I went to college, I left Ohio, and I went to college on the East Coast, I went to Princeton, and everything was based on New York. I was a nerd, and intellectuals, quote-unquote, want to go to New York. So, I really only started considering [L.A.] when I was researching PhD programs — I realized that a scholar whose work I had used a lot in the course of my master’s thesis was at UCLA. And then I looked up the rest of the [comparative literature] program and liked how progressive it was.
I am not the modern, modest Muslim lady my mother wanted, nor the good wife my grandfather must have envisioned in a daughter-in-law or granddaughter. The old bling glares and guards me.
JT: We met through a mutual friend, right before both of us were moving to L.A. I was taking a job at UCLA as a professor, and you were about to start grad school. I don’t think she anticipated that either of us would particularly like L.A.
MR: It was a little bit like, “find solace in each other.” [laughs]
JT: Which leads to the next question: The main character of “Liquid” is very intelligent and processes the world through a literary, critical gaze, while also interested in rom-coms [laughs]. But I’m wondering about being an intellectual in L.A. and finding community, which I think for Angelenos who live here and are from here, it’s like, “Of course.” But when you first move to this city, you wonder, where are all the book nerds?
MR: I think that that’s definitely true in terms of the lived community in the city. It takes a while to figure it out. Given the fact that I was attached to UCLA, I wasn’t starved for conversation. I think one thing that the book is interested in is how many L.A.s exist within Los Angeles, and the fact that it means such different things to different people, and it means different things in fundamental ways — how they relate to their bodies, what they wear, whether they wax. You also see [the narrator] continuing to explore the city and going places she wouldn’t have had access to, if not for attaching herself to one of these dates.
JT: Yes, the book is hilarious about dating. She’s trying to go on 100 dates in order to find a rich person to marry. The tone of the first half of the book, which is set in L.A., is very wry. I think you characterize the city in a fascinating way, and I don’t think you’re denigrating at all, but where she is in her life — she’s an adjunct professor, trying to make ends meet, scraping things together — she feels very dissatisfied, very much searching. Talk a little bit about dating and style in L.A.
MR: She has a lot of fun with style in L.A. She finds it very freeing. She often provides the tags of what she’s wearing, it’s almost like a fashion article or something. There are designer names floating throughout the book — that’s tied up in her dissatisfaction, because she has to do a lot of thrift store hunting and consignment hunting to be able to buy the pieces that she buys.
JT: Which is very eco-friendly!
MR: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. [laughs] There’s an interest in how big the city is, geographically and in population, but also in terms of the emotional landscape of L.A. There’s a playfulness there that wouldn’t exist, for example, if you were writing a book set in New York. The feel of the city is chaotic, and everything goes. And there’s a lot of color, right? Blue skies, and she talks about the palm trees and the flowers.
Inside you are your main audience. The joy lies in the freedom. Be extra. Go bold.
There’s also a threatening aspect to that sunniness that I think you’re getting at — the opposite of the trope of darkness representing difficulty. Oftentimes the brightest moments, the brightest light, is what indicates her dissatisfaction. That does speak to the experience of the city. When you move to L.A. as a transplant, you have a totally different relationship to the sun than you ever did before. You’re spending insane amounts of money on sunscreen, and you’re buying all these hats — you used to make fun of people who wear hats.
JT: Did I? Well, jokes on me. I’m rapidly turning into a leather bag. I’ve resigned myself to it. But yeah, on the East Coast, it’s the seasons. My emotional and mental state was so deeply tied to the seasons. I’m used to falling back in love with the world in spring and going wild in summer, and then getting serious in the fall, getting incredibly depressed in the winter. That was just the routine of my life. And L.A., it’s such a shock, because when you move here and when it’s time to be depressed for three months, it’s still blindingly bright out.
MR: There are seasons, but they’re so small, and the wavelengths are much smaller, the change is much smaller, and that really mimics her experience and the PhD. Because things are changing slightly, she is progressing in the program, and you end up meeting her after she’s done, and she’s just reminiscing on that, and her life still hasn’t really changed. That kind of movement through time without the satisfaction of a big change, whether it’s a downturn to winter or an upturn to spring, is important too.
JT: In the second half of the book, she moves to Tehran. You were talking about the similarities between the two cities and yet the book feels completely different when she arrives.
MR: Yes, because her position is different. She’s an outsider, right? When you catch her in her L.A. moment, she’s been there for a long time, and she’s trying to stay. Her dissatisfaction is with the fact that it’s not working out — her job isn’t good enough to justify that. The reason I wanted her to move to Tehran, in part, was because she is such a smart ass. She always has a read on everything. And then that gets completely destabilized. Again, to use a metaphor that applies to both cities, it’s like there’s an earthquake between that separates the two halves. The ground falls out from under her feet. She doesn’t know her way around.
There’s also a kind of joke about the kind of blind insistence that it takes to be a scholar, to keep doing what you’re doing, even when the world is falling apart, or even when you are falling apart emotionally. You see that in the book too, because she actually finds a way to continue her project.
JT: I want to pivot a little bit to talk about academia. Your main character is a hyper-educated, hyper-intelligent humanist, trapped in poorly remunerated, precarious, adjunct labor. I think there’s a valid critique of the academy inherent in the novel. Though you wrote this before the culture shifted — do things feel different at this particular political moment, when universities are being attacked from the right?
MR: I think there’s a more basic point too, which is that the book wasn’t written for this world. It’s all set in the summer of 2019 as a tight timeline of three months, and its criticisms are not of the current rule. In some ways, it’s small potatoes compared to what’s happening now. Unfortunately, books take so long to come out that even if you write them pretty quickly, they’re always going to be dated. And in terms of the concern with academia, it’s not even really a criticism of academia itself so much as the decadence of the kind of capitalism we’re living in right now, which does not support the arts, has no use for abstract thinking. It used to be that academia was the equivalent of a convent, where the nuns and monks went to do their thinking, and even that doesn’t exist anymore. The criticism is really on the broader culture than the politics of the convent, but certainly she also has these petty concerns of her own life, and she wants to make more money and she wants to buy nicer clothes and go to nicer restaurants.
JT: Yeah, for a long time, it was thought of as a vocation, and the promise of that has all but evaporated. Meanwhile, here’s this character in L.A. and everything’s flashy and shiny and sexy, and she’s young, and she wants to be flashy and shiny and sexy too, and she is. It is a very sexy book. What were you thinking about when writing sex?
MR: Before I wrote the book, my rule about sex scenes was, don’t write them. They always fail. If you’re trying to make it hot, it sounds stupid. If you’re trying to point out some weird aspect of sex, it just becomes gross or grotesque. But this book is really interested in the construction of femininity, like it’s not a natural thing. I just had to do it in order for the book to actually be talking about what it claimed to be talking about. The book is also invested in dating norms and gendered norms, and she dates women and men. There’s a joke about how she ends up dating so many more men precisely because wealth distribution is not equal among the genders in the US.
JT: This very rom-com concept you’ve come up with — going on 100 dates in order to marry rich. It collapses sex and power. Makes it all very transparent and transactional. She rejects the fantasy that sex is only about intimacy and connection, and not about these other kinds of transactions. When intimacy pops up, it’s actually quite surprising in the novel and almost more authentic, because she must really be feeling something.
But tonally, it’s a cynical way to begin the novel, right? And it moves to a completely different place in the end, but it begins in a cynical place. It’s interesting, because I think of L.A. as one of the least cynical places I’ve ever lived. This is obviously a gross generality, but it really feels true to me that people here tend to take a more optimistic tone. I’m wondering about the experience of having such a cynical character in such, again, a cheery, sunny spot.
MR: Well, I think that the cheeriness, the friendliness, they’re kind of clothes, right? Like it is covering something. And all clothes are not lies, sometimes people feel that their clothes actually express themselves, but there’s always that distance between the body and what you’re presenting to other people.
Justin Torres is the author of “We the Animals” and “Blackouts,” which won the National Book Award.
