A Glimpse into 1950s Tehran with Author Jasmin Darznik

Jasmin Darznik stunned the audience with a potent glimpse into 1950's Tehran, as she read from her book, The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life, Monday at the Capitola Book Cafe.

“I am the product of the Iranian Revolution [where] many thousands of families left in the late 1970s,” began Darznik, who was born in Tehran and came to the United States with her Iranian mother and European father when she was 3 years old.

Darznik said it wasn’t until she was in her late 20s that she learned the reason for her family’s immigration: Her mother, Lili, had been married at 13 and had a daughter she was forced to leave behind in order to escape the wrath of her abusive husband.

Although the author herself appears in her memoir, Darznik makes it clear that she is not the center of it—the story, she reminds us, is her mother’s.

“I think this story was my mother’s story for my sister, told through me,” said Darznik, whose half-sister was told that her mother had abandoned her of her own volition. 

Darznik explained that divorce in Tehran in the 1950s was almost unheard of and that her mother, at the age of 14, had vowed never to speak her daughter’s name in order to protect her life.

Darznik only discovered her mother's past secret life after finding an old photograph of her former family—50 years after the birth of her sister—and it was then that her mother finally broke her silence.

Piece by piece and over the course of 10 cassette tapes, Darznik's mother told her story.

“It’s as close as I've ever been, not only to my mother, but to Iran,” said Darznik, who spent a year going over the details of her memoir with her mother. “I was living in this sort of Iranian world in my own making.”

Darznik read from her prologue and then from the first chapter of her book, which detailed her mother’s wedding-night memories from all of those years ago.

“It was the first day of her marriage, and already she had learned this: To face the wall and to stifle her cries,” Darznik read with tenderness, as though she were reading it aloud for the first time.

Darznik read with emotion, and the audience was thoroughly moved as she described the tradition of the “white handkerchief,” which was passed to female relatives and used to prove the consummation of marriage, as family waited outside the bedroom door.

After hearing Darznik's reading, local writer and book enthusiast, Georgine Balassone, said she's excited to read the book.

“She was the kind of author where I thought, ‘Can I just sit here and have you read the whole book to me?'” Balassone said, clutching her signed copy of The Good Daughter. “I didn’t even know who she was, but now I'm so intrigued to keep reading.”

Karen C. Rowe, another local writer, commends Darznik for her ability to write about such personal topics.

“We continue to look for the talent of writing about mothers; it’s hard to write about mothers,” Rowe said.

Darznik is working now on a book of historical fiction set in 1950s Tehran that details the life of Forugh Farrokhzad, a renegade female poet and film director.