Bestselling author Jasmin Darznik tells of ‘missing women’ history forgets at Women in Conversation event

Bestselling author Jasmin Darznik writes about missing women, but her books aren’t whodunit thrillers or true crime stories.

As she explained to a rapt audience Wednesday night at the newly renovated Studio Theatre at Santa Rosa Junior College, the missing women in her books are those whom history has a tendency to ignore.

Darznik, the author of the the New York Times bestseller “The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life,” as well as two other historical fiction novels, “Song of a Captive Bird” and “The Bohemians,” spoke as part of the Women in Conversation series co-sponsored by The Press Democrat.

The ongoing series, now in its seventh year, aims to bring the broader community together through topics of particular interest to women.

Darznik’s family fled Iran in 1978 in the tense months before the Iranian Revolution.

They settled in Marin County, where her parents ran a hotel and she described living an immigrant experience that felt on the “edges and margins of American life.”

Always an avid reader, Darznik did what her family expected of her. Graduating from law school, she went on to pursue a doctorate in English literature, which to her family, she joked to appreciative laughter from the crowd, “was like running away with the Grateful Dead.”

Her first book, “The Good Daughter,” published in 2010, is the compelling story of her mother whose first marriage took place when she was just 13 years old, a shocking revelation Darznik only discovered as a young adult. Her mother divorced that husband, and in doing so, had to leave behind her young daughter, a half-sister Darznik has never met.

Much of the evening’s conversation centered on Iran, a country Darznik left when she was 5 years old but added: “Iran never left me.”

She said her hopes of ever returning, even for a visit, are slim.

Two of her books, which are sometimes critical of the Iranian government, have been published there and her high profile puts her in some degree of jeopardy.

Darznik addressed last fall’s protests in Iran, which were sparked by outrage over the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was killed by the country’s morality police for wearing her veil too loosely and skinny jeans.

“For the first time it felt like Americans saw Iranians as human,” she said, inducing a murmur of what seemed to be conviction from the audience.

She said those protests gained prominence in part because of our society’s greater understanding of injustices brought about by the Black Lives Matter movement, and said there’s a feeling that all these social justice movements are interconnected.

The issue of race is at the heart of her most recently released work of historical fiction, “The Bohemians,” a novel published in 2021 about the famed photographer Dorothea Lange and her assistant, a Chinese-American woman who was never named in any documents or writings about Lange.

In the novel, though, Darznik names her Caroline Lee, creating an imagined identity for a woman that history forgot during an era of deep-seated anti-Asian sentiment in the 1920s.

The fictional Lee is one of those “missing women” Darznik referred to at the beginning of the evening, and represents why she’s passionate about the important role historical fiction can play.

“Fiction presents an obligation to lessen the lies of history,” said Darznik.

As an associate professor and chair of the MFA program in writing at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, Darznik offered advice to those who have their own stories they want to tell.

She encouraged aspiring writers to find a community of others with the same passion, like she did 15 years ago when she began attending a writing workshop at Book Passage in Corte Madera.

It was at those sessions where she wrote the first portion of what would become “The Good Daughter.”

As the mother of a toddler at the time, she had to make a commitment to find small windows of time to write, even for just an hour or so.

“You can write a book, as long as you keep returning to the page,” she said.

As for herself, Darznik is returning to the page, working on her next book, “American Goddess,” a novel inspired by the life of the late actress and sex symbol Rita Hayworth, a Latina whose identity was whitewashed by powerful Hollywood executives.

You can reach Staff Writer Jennifer Graue at 707-521-5262 or jennifer.graue@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @JenInOz.