CURRENT PROJECTS

Carry the Sand Away from the Walls is a memoir about the author’s relationship with her Iranian, Zoroastrian, communist father. His experiences of poverty and a coup d’état in Iran shaped him in ways that didn’t translate well in 1980s America or mesh with her Jewish American mother’s embrace of the American Dream. As Iran and the US went from friends to enemies, Nasrabadi and her father lost the closeness they had once shared⎯both because of the pressure to belong in her mother’s white, middle class world and because of her father’s increasingly violent temper. After many years of estrangement from her father and all things Iranian, the author traveled to Iran to live among the extended family she hardly new existed before, learned her father’s language, and emerged from their troubled past to welcome him back into her life.