Award-winning Iranian-American novelist and filmmaker, Laleh Kahdivi’s funny novel about a daughter discovering her mother’s secret past. When in Los Angeles, a senior accoutant Heti’s mother, Anahita, dies, she leaves behind a spotless legacy: affectionate parent, modern career woman, and life of the party. Heti moves in a daze until her grief is upended by the arrival of an unmarked package arrives from England, containing photographs of Anahita as a young woman- robed, (her country of origin appears to be Iran by is unnamed), standing in front of a burning building in a black robe and pointing a gun at a group of sobbing distraught young women dressed in miniskirts. “They say grief needs a turn of seasons- one summer, fall, winter and spring- before the sadness lets go.” Because Heti is an only child, the responsibility falls on her. Heti is forced to revisit everything she thought she knew about her mother. Over the ensuing year, she meets various women who unburden themselves, prompting her in meditate on the interior lives others, including her own two daughters, are forced to conceal.
The book is divided into four seasons, starting and ending in Spring, and is narrated as a series of vignettes – some chapters are only a couple of pages- in an understated conversational tone. Heti’s exchanges with family, friends and strangers. Heti vists AllEros Media, “the only female owned erotica site in the valley”. There she meets Morgan, a woman on her first porn shoot, who confides that she has “compulsive sexual behaviour disorder” and that her therapist has suggested immersion therapy so she can be “less aroused” all the time. As Heti observes “What happens in these shoots is a kind of freedom… Where I come from, where my mother and I were born, a woman’s pleasure can destroy her. Over there, a person with your sexual superpower would be against the law, would be dead.”
The owner of Anahita’s favourite Mexican restaurant, highlights the potential for freedom in losing a mother: “ If my mother hadn’t died so young…. I wouldn’t have gotten a divorce… or been able to buy this restaurant… my life would be an exact copy of my mom’s, working in a kitchen, married to an asshole, raising some daughters and just doing what had to be done.”
During the memorial, we learn the truth behind the photographs and see that Heti’s encounters with others have given her the strength to face this final revelation.
Female Life on Planet Earth follows Heti as she raises teenage daughters, keeps up with client accounts, sits in LA traffic, and prepares to host the traditional anniversary memorial- all the while quietly reeling with the violent secrets of the woman she thought she knew. Though the dead can’t answer her questions, the living never seem to shut up. Heti is buoyed as she listens to the women who populate her world: hilarious aunts and cousins, aggressive soccer moms, business associates, dear friends, and total strangers. Inside these surprising, uproarious stories of female life, Heti discovers the selves women hide away, selves defiantly in search of pleasure, autonomy, delight, and connection. Heti begins to understand the complex and contradictory possibilities that exist inside every woman- including her mother, including herself. AS the one-year mark of Ana’s death arrives, Heti calls together the women who knew her and asks them: Who was my mother, truly? And who are we?
Told with humour and emotional precision, Female Life on Planet Earth is a celebration of lineage, inheritance, and the boundlessness of women over time and space.
Female Life on Planet Earth by Laleh Khadivi, Oneworld £16.99/ Ecco $28, 224 pages.
