Dialogue: Women in Rebellion

Bestselling author Amy Tan in conversation with Iranian-American author Susanne Pari on her much-anticipated novel,  In the Time of Our History, a story about the universal longing to create a home in this world—and what happens when we let go of how we’ve always been told it should look. Longtime friends Pari and Tan share how their fiction captures the many ways in which women raised by immigrants rebel against familial and societal norms.

A Q&A follows the event.

This is a hybrid event. Registration is required for Zoom attendance. In-person attendance does not require registration; seats available first come, first served.

Inspired by her own family’s experiences following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Pari explores the entangled lives within an Iranian American family grappling with generational culture clashes, the roles imposed on women and a tragic accident that forces them to reconcile their guilt or forfeit their already tenuous bonds. Set between San Francisco and New Jersey in the late-1990s.

"I fell in love with this jewel of a novel from the first page. It’s a universal tale that naturally leads to self-reflection and conversations about the changing relationship between mothers and daughters, and the choices we make, good and bad, early in life and late, which determine our identity." —Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club

Susanne Pari is an Iranian-American novelist, journalist, essayist and book reviewer. Born in New Jersey to an Iranian father and an American mother, she grew up both in the United States and Iran until the 1979 Islamic Revolution forced her family into permanent exile. Since then, her writing has focused on stories of displacement and belonging, of identity and assimilation, of trauma and resilience. Her first novel, The Fortune Catcher, has been translated into six languages and her non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, National Public Radio and Medium. A former Program Director for Book Expo, she is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, the Author's Guild, the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto and the Castro Writers' Cooperative. She serves on the board of the Lakota Children's Enrichment Writing Project and is an alumna of the Hedgebrook Writing Residency. She blogs occasionally for the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies and divides her time between Northern California and New York. 

Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life, Saving Fish from Drowning, and two children's books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which was adapted into a PBS television series. Tan was also a coproducer and coscreenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club. She wrote the libretto for the opera The Bonesetter’s Daughter and is the subject of the American Masters documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir.  Tan is an instructor of a MasterClass on Fiction, Memory, and Imagination. Her current project, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, will be published in 2024. Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and her work has been translated into thirty-five languages. She lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York.

Books available by Book Passage

Susanne Pari - Website | Susanne Pari - Instagram | Susanne Pari - Twitter

Amy Tan - Website | Amy Tan - Instagram | Amy Tan - Twitter