A woman living in California discovers her mother may have been a merciless enforcer of the Islamic revolution, in an intriguing novel of inheritance and identity
“It’s a little scary, isn’t it, inheritance?” That’s what Heti, the protagonist of Laleh Khadivi’s latest novel, remarks to a “soccer mom” as they watch their daughters play. “We don’t get to choose what we inherit. Or what we pass on.” Heti, who lives in Los Angeles, is Iranian-American and works for an accountancy firm. She has two daughters, Ava and Zora, and her mother has recently died. When Ava scores a goal, the soccer mom asks, “Did she get that from you?”, but Heti is less interested in the skills that parents pass to their children than the secrets they keep from them.
Khadivi’s novel is about mothers and the mysteries they contain. In Female Life on Planet Earth she asks what happens when the people closest to us turn out to be strangers. How do we manage our grief and memorialise our loss when those we love have hidden awful parts of their lives? At the beginning of the book, Heti receives strict instructions from an Iranian aunt about the correct way to mark her mother’s passing. “One year after the death you throw a party,” she is told, “so that [people] can think about your mother, really remember and mourn her.” But then Heti receives a startling set of photographs from an unknown sender. In one image, a younger version of her mother stands veiled in black, a machine gun slung over her shoulder. In a second image, the weapon is extended towards a group of handcuffed women, “their miniskirts uneven on their hips, rips in their tight sweaters”, some crying before the camera, another lying prone, “face pressed into the concrete floor”.