I was born in the late 1970s, but I’m writing about Tehran between the timeframe of the 1950s to the late 1970s. In writing about the period before my birth, I’m adding and subtracting things from the Tehran that I remembered. I also spent a lot of time researching and figuring out what shops existed, what buildings weren’t there yet by researching names and looking at pictures from the 1950s.

I’m partially writing this from memory in terms of feel and atmosphere. Then a lot of it was my research. If you were to go to Tehran today, I don’t think that you would recognize much of what I’ve written in the novel.

I spent my childhood within the situation in Iran. I was always very confused and angered by it. I was always trying to understand why it existed and why this regime treated its people in this way. It was a matter of me trying to understand — and in large part come to terms with — what I thought was evil and maybe undo some of the biases that I had. I tried to see things from the point of view that I hadn’t considered before. I had all these poisonous feelings that I wanted to get rid of, excise them from me as you would a cancer.