In “Rana Joon and the One & Only Now,” the debut novel from Shideh Etaat, teenage Rana approaches high school graduation while managing grief, family struggle and the decision to open up about her sexuality.
Set against the backdrop of the mid-1990s San Fernando Valley, it’s a touching tale with details that might ring familiar to locals of a certain age, from the hip-hop jams playing at house parties to the all-ages venue where Rana eventually performs.
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“It was really important for it to take place in the ‘90s because there’s a certain sense of nostalgia and a certain sense of everything just felt simpler,” says Etaat, who grew up in Calabasas and now lives in Woodland Hills.
The book was a bit of a respite from the project that Etaat began in grad school, a research-intense book spanning decades of Iranian history.
“I spent years in research and diving into imagining a time and a place that was so far removed from my experience,” says Etaat, whose family is from Iran, about the book that landed her an agent. “I think after I finished that, I just really wanted to be in a world that felt like my own and felt very comfortable and I didn’t have to use my imagination in that way. I wanted to create a story in a time and a place that felt very real and familiar to me, but also wasn’t about me.”
A traumatic experience led Etaat to briefly stop writing. While she chose not to speak too much about it, she offered some details about it. “My husband was in an accident and suffered a traumatic brain injury while I was pregnant,” she says. “For a year, I didn’t want to write. I didn’t want to read fiction.”
Then, not long after the birth of her son, Etaat realized that she needed to work on something. “I felt like [Rana] came knocking and was like, ‘Hey, let’s play, let’s party, let’s do this,’” she says. “It felt light and doable and almost like I needed her. I needed to get back to her in some way.”
In the process of diving back into the 1990s, Etaat was able to incorporate some of what she had learned about mindfulness as an adult into the novel. “One thing after another started to open up and the mindfulness aspect of it became more a reflection of what I was really into at the time of writing it,” she says. There are references to Alan Watts, the self-described “philosophical entertainer” that Etaat recalls hearing as a teenager via her older brother. One character also has a love for Wu-Tang Clan, which stems from Etaat reading RZA’s 2009 book, “The Tao of Wu.”
While the 1990s might seem simple in comparison to today, life is complicated for the book’s protagonist. Rana, the oldest child and only daughter in an Iranian-American family. She lost her best friend, the only person who knows that Rana likes girls, about a year prior to the start of the story. And Rana’s father moved back to Iran, though he occasionally pops into L.A. for visits. Her mom, who is harboring her own secret, fusses over Rana’s appearance. And her younger brother has much more freedom to do what he wants than Rana does.
Yet, in a world without smartphones and social media, Etaat’s characters connect with each other in ways that are frequently awkward and occasionally disastrous. In the first scene that Etaat wrote, Rana, who told her mother she was studying with a friend, comes home high and starts eating the French fries her mom made for her brother’s water polo event.
That scene with the French fries morphs into a pivotal moment in the book when Rana’s mother, who is listening to an Iranian advice show on the radio, remarks, much to Rana’s dismay, “The neighbor’s child being gay I can handle, but not my own. Not ever you or Babak.”
Etaat refers to it as one of the key lines in the novel. “I think it’s a sentiment that many Iranians of that generation might carry, which is, I’m fine with gay people, but not you, not my child,” says Etaat. “Is that being an ally? Not really. That feeling of, ‘I can be tolerant, I can understand this, but when it comes to my own child I would never want it for them,’ I think I really wanted to emphasize that idea that I think is pretty common with that generation.”
What makes the novel stand out is the compassion that Etaat extends to multiple generations of characters as they navigate unfamiliar situations with very different perspectives, which are often expressed through their meals.
“I tend to write about food a lot,” says Etaat. In a book centered around what the author describes as a “well-intentioned dysfunctional family,” food plays a major role in how the characters bond — Rana’s mom is a cooking teacher— and, ultimately, come to know each other better.
“I think that her relationship with her mom is shown through the way that food is presented,” says Etaat. In fact, food is a language through which Rana’s mother communicates what she doesn’t express verbally and by the story’s end this is something that Rana seems to understand.
“A huge part of the book is coming to understand that kind of moment where you stop being a kid a little bit and you start seeing your parents as people.”
