My mother tells a story of two young Franco Iranians living in Paris experiencing an identity crisis.
There are many plots inside the plot in my novel.
And because their destinies of these two friends are going to diverge.
One becomes more religious than the other. Both trying to find their roots.
My time at Oxford was very much of an inspiration to write this novel because I made many Muslim friends as well as other friends.
My husband was Iranian and I met him at Oxford when I was there.
I also made friends from Egypt, Palestinian descent, and also Turkey, one of our best friends who now is from Turkey.
So what happened is that all his friends were very open.
They had values, I found that were very different from the ones we were putting forward in the West.
Loyalty and honesty and sincerity, thoughtfulness, kindness.
And I saw that these values that they had ingrained in themselves was very much made it much harder for them to integrate in our societies,
because in our societies we don't really put these complex qualities forward.
It was when I realised that how misunderstood all the Muslims were.
After 9/11 that I decided to write this book.
I purposes to the form of fiction because I thought it was a much better way to convey emotions and empathy than if I chose to write an essay.
I my background is from journalism and I write a lot of articles, of course,
but then I find it much harder to write articles and fiction, surprisingly, because when you write fiction, you are very free.
Whereas when you write articles, you have to really follow a pattern of research and you can never do enough research to write an article or so.
I always want to be very impartial when I write an article and it's always very hard to be very unbiased.
What came as a surprise in the writing process was how easy it was to write fiction.
When I decided to start my novel and when I completed my first wife, it only took two months.
I conceived a long, detailed summary, and then I started to write chapter after chapter.
What I didn't know is that it was going to take a much longer time to rewrite and rewrite
and rewrite in order to get a finished product that I could send to a publisher.
On the whole, it took me two years, but I strongly recommend the journey.
I learnt many things during my time at Wooster that helped me my writing career.
First, the tutors encouraged us to do research index, which was extremely helpful for my work in journalism and as a novelist.
We had a solid, fantastic Provo's, Lord Brooks, who was Autumn Safran historian,
and he taught us how to pursue research in all different different domains, encouraged us greatly in the novel.
The main character is one of the academic specialities of Islam who teaches at Wooster College.
And lastly, one of my translators had to translate as one of them is this young woman, linguist from Bob from Wooster College.
But finally, I just wanted to mention that Oxford in general helped me find out who I was and
also encouraged us to accomplish what we really wanted to achieve in our lives.