Losing My Grandma and Finding the Words for It in ‘The Sandbox’

I have a deep bond with the literature that was recommended to me by the man I used to love. Some of the books he passed along I rejected out of hand—books such as Never Let Me Go and The Cement Garden and Child of God. Knee-jerk reactions to literature are one of my bad habits, then and now—but my beloved was patient with me. He enjoyed playing tricks on me, and he used tricks to encourage me to read. These tricks were clever and varied. It would begin with finding ways to put me in a story’s situation, such as that of Jenny in An Education. Or he would suggest that we watch a film adapted from a book he thought I should read, such as The Danish Girl. My beloved would sometimes make me terribly jealous by mentioning his female friends, who had read the books he liked.

I like best authors’s until after my beloved had died, when one of my professors introduced it to our class as one of the most popular texts in 20th-century drama classes in Iran.