A Time to Wail: Female Life on Planet Earth by Laleh Khadivi

Elisabeth and I have a running joke about the large quantity of books that feature jacket copy beginning with “Three generations of women...” and how these types of stories are catnip for book clubs (not that there’s anything wrong with generational stories! or book clubs! or women!). The fact that some stories of this genre are churned out of a historical fiction mill directly into the gaping maw of Big Book Club makes it all the more exciting to find a real, raw, devastating reckoning with generational inheritance among women like Female Life on Planet Earth by Laleh Khadivi.

The book centers on Heti, an Iranian American woman in her forties whose mother, Ana, has recently died. Heti is informed by her aunt that it is her duty as Ana’s daughter to organize an elaborate party for the one-year anniversary of her mother’s death. She sets out her expectations for the party carefully to Heti, in a tone that establishes the book’s delightful understated humor: “There are times to speak and times to be silent, and times for people to cry, and even a time to wail. Tell your neighbors to expect some loud noises, tell them it’s part of our custom and please, do not call the police.” After the phone call, Heti makes a to-do list: “bakery in Mission Viejo, rent extra chairs, repair the side fence, notify neighbors of wailing, dresses for the girls.”

We follow Heti in the months and then days leading up to the party as she goes about her quiet life in Los Angeles as a CPA in the entertainment industry and mother of two teenage daughters. One particular joy of the novel is how episodic it often feels—with the opening of each chapter, the reader experiences a kind of vertiginous drop into Heti’s life. Here she is on set at a pornography studio, overseeing the finances but also interviewing performers. Here she is taking her daughters to their favorite pop star’s concert. Here she is at an open mic stand-up performance where a child tells scatological jokes to a roomful of adults. There is a drifting, aimless quality to the narrative that is in perfect harmony with Heti’s contemplative examination of her mother’s life and legacy. The visual details are likewise stunning and totally original, for instance: “On her upper thigh she had a tattoo of herself, in a bathing suit, that showed all her other tattoos in miniature.”

Through these varied episodes Heti deals with the central conflict of the obscuring of her mother’s life by death. Shortly after hearing from her aunt, Heti receives in the mail from an anonymous friend of her mother pictures taken in Ana’s youth in Iran that are inexplicable to her. One of them depicts Ana holding a machine gun menacingly toward a group of women dressed in typical Western attire, prompting the obvious and disturbing question, was Heti’s mother some kind of religious fundamentalist before she emigrated to the States? The photos were presumably taken around the time of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Was she on the wrong side of history, part of the conservative movement to stem the tide of women’s rights and other liberal democratic ideals?

In her fourth novel, Khadivi asks, what does one do with these questions we can no longer ask, hidden stories that can never be unraveled, which the dead have taken with them to their graves?

There is a thread about the significance of art and writing that runs, somewhat unexpectedly, through this novel that is, at its core, primarily about a grieving accountant. In one scene, Heti commissions an exiled Iranian poet living in America to write a poem about her mother to be read at the party. The poet, who is referred to only as such, remarks on the connection between womanhood and craft:

“Where I am from, women are tied to one dimension, the dimension of the female—daughterhood, wifehood, motherhood—and so things like poetry, dreams, sometimes their children, sometimes insanity, those are the only escapes...A poem is a great place to hide something...And now...I am starting to understand that a woman’s life is a good place to hide something too.”

One of the most searing questions of female life is, of course, what kind of woman should I be? And many of us answer that question by observing what kind of woman our mothers are (and then in many cases we do the exact opposite).

It’s worth noting that this is not just a book “about women.” It’s a book about racialized, immigrant women. Though it is abundantly clear by context, the family’s nation of origin is never stated, and no specific historical context is provided (i.e., no place names, no real historical events mentioned), other than the fact that they have a Muslim background. This gives Heti’s story a sort of universal quality while still being hyper-specific. But a lot of the humor, and the pathos for that matter, is driven by the fact that this is an immigrant story. In the midst of a conversation about the many rituals and responsibilities required by their religion upon a loved one’s death, Heti’s cousin Mina remarks that she married her husband because “he’s not an immigrant, because he doesn’t wake up every day and think what if something happens, he just wakes up and waits for the world to give him what he wants.” The novel explores the tension in the second generation of being respectful toward customs that may seem far from their daily reality while taking full advantage of the (limited) privilege they can find in an American landscape that is in some ways inhospitable but in others still bountiful with opportunity.

In the same scene (which also includes Mina extolling the virtues of the sale prices at the Costco in which it is set), Mina tells Heti, “when I die just get rid of me as quickly as you can. Incinerate, bury, dumpster, whatever. If you do any of this hocus-pocus old-world crap I will haunt you for the rest of your days.”

While there is immense pleasure to be had in the episodic encounter with each individual chapter, the question of what Ana’s life was like before she left Iran, and whether or not Heti will ever get answers, is a source of significant dramatic tension. There are answers, and I respected Khadivi’s direct approach with this, as another author might have leaned more into the ambiguity and can-we-ever-really-know-one-another of it all. Sure, there’s a limit to what we can know, but the basic biographical facts of a life are often there to be discovered by those brave enough to ask questions, and Khadivi realistically accounts for this reality.

Female Life on Planet Earth is a quiet book with a booming impact. It asks the reader to ruminate on the meaning of life and the significance of what they will leave in their wake when they go. It is also a deeply generous, forgiving book, establishing that we need not be defined by our most harmful choices, that there can be space for a loving, meaningful life after even the gravest mistake.

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