I don’t remember if I was read to as a small child. My first memory of becoming an avid reader is from when I was around the age of 7. It was a summer day, school was on summer break, and my father took me to work to keep me occupied for a day. He was a manager at a department store and would take me to work occasionally so that my mother could take a break from my sister and my bickering. When I was bored out of my mind, I would beg my father to take me to work with him, and once in a while he obliged. I would roam around the department store and watch people pass by. That day, after he finished work, while we lift the store, we passed a newsstand. There were many newspapers and magazine set carefully spread on the ground around the tiny kiosk. One magazine got my attention. The title was Keyhane Bacheha, or Cosmo for Children. The magazine cover was a caricature exaggeration of a man reading a book. I asked my father to buy me the magazine, but he responded that I didn’t need it. We kept on walking, but my father must have felt my disappointment because he turned back and bought the magazine for me. Back in our house, I read and re-read every page of the magazine and carefully examined the caricatures. I then used my monthly allowance to subscribe to the magazine and got new issues in the mail weekly. It was then that I found myself a passion for reading. A couple of years later, I write a short story for the magazine and got published. It was my first, and perhaps the biggest accomplishment, to this day.

Maybe it was because there was really not much a young girl could do under the control of Islamic laws and a bloody war with a neighboring country threatened our safely on a daily basis that I spent most of my free time reading. I remember spending spent every rial of my monthly allowance on novels, sometimes saving a few months to get the book I wanted, only to finish the book in a night. My favorites were Desiree (the diaries of Napoleon’s first love) and the Withering Heights. Sometimes books that had stayed on the shelf for a long time like Pedro Martinez, a long, tick book that I picked only to have more to read until my next monthly allowance.   Some of the readings were too abstract for me and I couldn’t understand the characters, plots, cultural references. Nonetheless, I kept on reading because reading was not just for pleasure, but an act of keeping myself occupied in the safety of the house.