Porochista Khakpour: I’ve Become Uninterested in Darkness

Porochista Khakpour’s remarkable new book, Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity, tells a deeply moving—and often startling—story of being brown-skinned in America. Ranging from Los Angeles to New York to Mississippi, these uncompromisingly honest essays are humorous and despairing, poignant and trenchant, as they explore alienation and the search for home.

Born in Tehran, Khakpour fled the Iranian Revolution with her family and settled in Los Angeles. The pain of leaving her country was intensified by the hostility and racism she encountered as a refugee in ’80s America, when Iranian-American relations were at a low point. “Imagine you’re a kid, barely in elementary school, and you’re already confronted with people just hating you,” Khakpour says. The trauma of those early years runs through the essays in Brown Album as well as Khakpour’s other work: two novels, Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007) and The Last Illusion (2014), and a memoir, Sick (2018), which chronicles her struggles with depression, drug addiction, and Lyme disease.

Khakpour moved to New York for college and now lives in Queens. She hasn’t chosen a family life, something her parents are “a little heartbroken” about; her mother called her “wild horse” when she was young, a nickname that embodied how her grandmothers thought of her. “My grandmas loved that I was rebellious,” Khakpour says, “and they saw real freedom in me that they never knew because they were illiterate teenagers when they had children.” In her grandmothers’ Sufi Muslim culture, women who didn’t get married and have kids were accepted. “Those women became the town sages. They were no longer sexualized, or seen as simply matriarchal; they were seen as teachers, or