In school we were asked to write a short story: fiction, not autobiography. I began mine with the sentence: 'Bombs dropped, the sky was ablaze, there was no night.' The teacher, who had been making her rounds, looking down at our papers as she went, saw mine and sniffed: 'Fiction does not have to be "real", but it does have to be truthful. A writer writes what she knows.' Embarrassed, I told her that I had lived through the Revolution in Iran. She apologised: Iran trumped everything, and she could neither prove nor disprove my statement. The truth was that the bombing I had experienced had presented itself only as loud thuds and clouds of smoke. Years later, when I saw a bomb turn a car to a rusted skeleton, I wasn't able to write about it - because I literally couldn't believe my eyes.

LRB 31 July 2008 | PDF Download