Iranian women tend to be portrayed in popular culture and the media more as symbols than as actual people. They’re frequently reduced to unforgettable and contradictory images: the willowy ingenues of Persian miniature tableaus, housewives of the 1960s and ’70s frolicking in miniskirts and bathing suits, a sea of anonymous all-black chadors after the 1979 revolution, and, in recent years, protesters shedding and burning their veils.
In 2025, it is hard to imagine any chronicle of Iranian women forgoing mention of Women, Life, Freedom—the game-changing protest movement against compulsory hijab and the Islamic Republic’s patriarchal regime that followed the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini (also known as Jina), in police custody in Tehran. And yet, so far, I haven’t come across many mentions of WLF in contemporary global literature. The omission might be attributed to the movement’s lack of clear-cut denouement, or perhaps to the fact that many of the players may have not yet come of age (the average age of arrested protesters was just 15). But it also seems possible that many authors aren’t sure how to write about Iranian female identity, a subject that can lend itself more to iconography than to realism. 
One way to avoid this pitfall is to set the story thousands of miles away, far from the homeland, in one of the many Iranian diaspora communities that flourish worldwide. I’ve done this with several of my own novels, the last most explicitly so, with the title screaming the setting: Tehrangeles, which takes place in Los Angeles’s vibrant Iranian West Side enclave. Mariam Rahmani’s debut novel, Liquid, takes place in a different L.A.—not the one of crazy rich one-percenter influencers and content creators that I portrayed, but one of grad students, queer online daters, and disaffected Millennial dreamers. Here, the East Side, more humble though also more self-consciously hip, figures prominently. Not since I read Khashayar J. Khabushani’s emotional debut novel, I Will Greet the Sun Again, have I encountered an Iranian L.A. so familiar to me in its mildly dystopian urban-suburban geography, laconic wit, and depressive sultriness.
Liquid’s unnamed narrator, who lives in this bleak milieu, is at one of the most relatably challenging points in life. Just past 30, as worried as she is about her career (she’s recently completed a dissertation), she is even more concerned about her dismal love life. It turns out the two dilemmas might be more connected than they at first appear—and that solving her romantic predicament could actually render her job troubles moot.
She makes a plan—“a queer adjunct professor decides to marry rich … in order to write a book on companionate marriage based on her dissertation”—and decides to dedicate her free time to frenetically paced online dating, meticulously recording her encounters on a spreadsheet. Rahmani renders the protagonist’s anecdotes deliciously, with the crispy edges of the most satisfying rom-com: the Korean American trust-funder who lures her to his family’s Palm Springs estate, the butch lesbian producer in the Hollywood Hills whose Porsche she dents on her way out, the engineer with a Z4 who surprises her with his open marriage. And then there is the platonic-so-far best friend from college: Adam, who is constantly navigating the repeated rock bottoms of an on-again, off-again relationship with his serially unfaithful girlfriend. He seems to be one possible solution to the narrator’s romantic troubles, but their tender friendship results in all kinds of delicate dances for the bulk of the book.
Rahmani’s novel turns out to be less predictable than some of the above tropes might indicate. Before the narrator makes any meaningful progress in her search for a wealthy spouse, the story takes a sharp turn and suddenly we are elsewhere: Iran. After the narrator’s father has a heart attack, she abruptly takes off with her mother, who lives in the Midwest, to tend to him. What the reader might not expect is that even in Iran, she finds romance, although of a sort that’s very different from her flings in L.A. Whereas the California parts of this book, focused on the narrator’s various dating mishaps, feel charmingly familiar, nothing in Iran goes quite as planned. The narrator extends her trip well past her mother’s stay and her father’s death—even past her sapphic fling with Leili, her mysterious ceramicist neighbor—and she imagines what it would be like to exist in this universe, the one that many Iranians forced into exile may never encounter again.
Rahmani is in many ways reinventing the Iranian American novel, subtly yet substantially. In books such as Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and Sanam Mahloudji’s The Persians—and even most of my own—Iran is a symbol of all that has been lost once one leaves the country behind. But in Rahmani’s novel, the country is an actual setting for flesh-and-blood characters rather than a silent specter. Rahmani’s universe is never quiet; everything is spoken, often exhaustively and exhaustingly, in writing so electrically alive that the reader feels fully immersed in her world. In anecdotes about going out for a kebab sandwich, shopping for Persian fruit leather snacks, browsing bookstores, negotiating taxis, even getting fingered by her kohl-eyed neighbor, Rahmani’s realism is so ruggedly tangible, so honest to its details, that at times it’s easy to forget that this is a novel, not a memoir.
Other elements of the book break free from the mold of typical Iranian, and Iranian American, fiction. For one thing, the narrator is of mixed ethnicity (she is half Indian and half Iranian), which you rarely see depicted in such stories. Iranian novels also tend to include in-depth explorations of class; in Rahmani’s book, however, we don’t get a solid grasp of our narrator’s economic situation. She is an underemployed adjunct but also frequently goes to pricey spots and buys expensive things. And of course, several of her love interests are women, putting an interesting queer spin on traditionally heteronormative Iranian love stories (Akbar’s Martyr!, with its queer protagonist, is an exception).
The novel’s strength also lies partly in its prose: Rahmani’s writing is heavily carbonated and winkingly self-aware. Taking pictures for her dating-app profile in one scene, the narrator positions herself in front of a pomegranate tree and thinks, “A little self-Orientalizing never killed anyone.” And Rahmani rarely rests on clichés, even in the most offhand description. When she writes that “in sickness my father was reduced to the neon moods of a petulant child,” I couldn’t help but pause. Children’s moods, at their worst, will now forever be “neon” to me.
The most predictable—and perhaps disappointing—part of the book is its ending. I won’t spoil it, but fans of rom-coms might already guess the turn it takes from earlier in this essay. I couldn’t decide whether Rahmani’s conclusion was a cop-out or whether she was simply delivering on the reader’s expectation for a bit of formulaic cuteness—and therefore breaking another rule of Iranian fiction, and Iranian love stories in particular, which usually end in a labyrinth rather than a neat bow. In any event, plenty of romance novels fill their readers up with frosting but offer no foundation; Rahmani’s novel has both. Although I expected something more unusual, the classic rom-com ending reminded me that sometimes all you want is a little bit of sweetness. Even in flirting with conventionality, Rahmani comes out on top.
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