First Draft Episode #273: Arvin Ahmadi
September 29, 2020
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Arvin Ahmadi, author of Down and Across, Girl Gone Viral, and his latest, How it All Blew Up.
This episode is brought to you by Everything I Thought I Knew, a new young adult novel from Shannon Takoaka out from Candlewick Press October 13th. Eight months after 17 year old Chloe has a heart transplant everything is different. Most notably vivid, recurring nightmares about crashing a motorcycle in a tunnel and memories of people and places she doesn't recognize. As Chloe searches for answers, what she learns will lead her to question everything she thought she knew about life, death, love, identity, and the true nature of reality. Everything I Thought I Knew by Shannon Takoaka comes out from Candlewick Press on October 13th.
Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Arvin Ahmadi, author of Down and Across, Girl Gone Viral and his latest, How it All Blew Up, out now. I love what Arvin had to say about the power of running away, writing for an audience of one, the optimism of tech, and how many titles he and his team tried out before finally landing on How it All Blew Up.
Everything Arvin and I talk about on today's episode can be found in the show notes. First Draft participates in affiliate programs specifically with bookshop.org. So that means when you shop through the links on FirstDraftPod.com, it helps to support the podcast and independent bookstores at no additional cost to you. If you'd like to donate to First Draft either on a one-time or monthly basis, simply go to paypal.me/FirstDraftPod.
Track Changes, the First Draft mini-series that covers all the steps of how your book goes from your laptop to the bookshelf, is now complete. You can hear the entire series - nine episodes plus four bonus episodes - at FirstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges. And the publishing info party won't stop for subscribers to the Track Changes newsletter where every Thursday, sometimes Friday, I share more of the information that I gathered in researching for this project, as well as industry updates and more original reporting.
Last week, I covered some more of the publishing supply chain, specifically the bottleneck of actually printing books, which is kind of a story of bankruptcies and scandals and how Barack Obama's forthcoming memoir might cause a paper shortage. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial of the newsletter and learn more about both Track Changes projects @FrstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges.
Okay, now please sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with Arvin Ahmadi.
Sarah Enni: Hi, Arvin. How are you?
Arvin Ahmadi: Hey Sarah! Good to see you, talk to you, hear you.
Sarah Enni: I know, good to see you too. I was so excited to hear that you had a new book coming out, How it All Blew Up, and I can't wait to get into it and talk to you about it. But, as you know, I like to start my interviews way back at the very beginning. So I'm gonna ask where were you born and raised?
Arvin Ahmadi: Oh, wow. Yeah, that's really throwing it back to the very beginning. I was born and raised in Northern Virginia. I grew up just outside of DC, about half an hour outside of the Capitol. And yeah, just your typical suburb with a cul-de-sac and a shopping center down the road with a movie theater and Coldstone's.
Sarah Enni: I want to ask about books and reading and writing and how that was a part of growing up for you.
Arvin Ahmadi: It was huge. I mean, I was just thinking today that my entire childhood was kind of really three things. It was books, movies, and websites. And so I was thinking about that earlier today, just in the context of like what I want to do with the rest of my life, because existential questions like that pop up on the daily for all of us. But it was stories. Stories on screen and on the page.
So I was a voracious reader, I read everything I could get my hands on. I remember I read both The Magic Treehouse books and the nonfiction companion books, like I was just as interested. So there were so many Magic Treehouse books, but lesser known were the slightly thicker nonfiction companion books. Which, I guess for the more popular stories, like there was a dinosaur one, there was something maybe about Pompei, cause that was a story that I really loved. They would have a nonfiction text that dove into the history of it all.
Sarah Enni: That's so cool. I feel robbed that I didn't read these! What about writing?
Arvin Ahmadi: I was a writer too. It's funny, I only started writing when a tutor forced me to. I remember in the third or fourth grade, I got like a satisfactory grade in English, which to my Iranian parents was basically failing. And so they scrambled and they found a tutor, a reading and writing tutor, and one of my first assignments was to write a story. And so that first story was basically Pokemon fan fiction because that's the other thing I was obsessed with at that age. It was Pokemon.
So I wrote something about Ash Ketchum and she liked it. And I'm sure she red penned it, but that led to a bigger story, like my first novel. And that novel was called The Adventures of Jack and Skipper. And it was about a boy named Jack and his dog Skipper. And the only really memory, cause of course the pages are lost in time, or prised in a file cabinet at home.
But only plot point I remember is that Jack and Skipper were on an airplane and they happen to be sitting next to a detective. I guess I was trying to put myself in 10 or 11 year old Arvin shoes, that was probably like the beginning of the plot. That was probably the foundation for the plot was sitting next to this detective on an airplane with his dog. The dog was key.
Sarah Enni: I love that. I just want to ask about, you said books and writing and websites.
Arvin Ahmadi: And websites [chuckles].
Sarah Enni: What do you mean by that?
Arvin Ahmadi: I remember it was around fourth grade. I was making websites on Geo Cities. It was just for fun, you know, and I did it to show off cause the internet was - this was the early two thousands - so it was still a relatively new and exciting thing. So I was kind of doing it to show off to my classmates because I guess in my socially unaware mind, I thought that being a nerd was cool. That got hammered out of me eventually, but then hammered back in, thankfully.
But no, that was kind of my thing for a little while. And I remember that partly came from my dad who one of his pieces of advice as a kid was, "Don't just consume, create." So create the things you love, don't just read books, write them. Don't just surf the web make websites.
Sarah Enni: That's such great advice, holy cow!
Arvin Ahmadi: Yeah, and it's advice that I've taken with me today and has made me a really happy adult and has given me a happy career, you know? Cause I mentioned, in a past life, I worked in tech and I did really actually enjoy that job. I just enjoy writing even more.
Sarah Enni: I want to get to that. Obviously, everything we just talked about also ties into books that you wrote. But I do want to ask about, I heard that you wrote that book, maybe this was Jack and...Skipper?
Arvin Ahmadi: Skipper, yeah.
Sarah Enni: That you queried agents.
Arvin Ahmadi: Oh my god. I did. Wow. That's mortifying, isn't it? Yeah. I hopped on my parents, I don't think I even had an email account at the time, it was my parent's net zero dial up email account like [makes old phone line dialing sounds].
Sarah Enni: Yup [laughs]
Arvin Ahmadi: Everyone remembers that tone. Right? It haunts us all. But yes, I got on their email account and I emailed a ton of agents. Surprisingly didn't really get any full requests, let alone offers of representation. Sarah, not that I even had a full manuscript to show. I was so cocky. I was such a cocky 11 year old that I wrote three chapters and I was like, "I have completed my great American novel. Here you go. Take it or leave it."
Sarah Enni: "The world must know!"
Arvin Ahmadi: Yes, of course, all the agents were like, "Dude, you're 11 years old, email me in 10 years."
Sarah Enni: The reason I love that story, and you're actually far from the only writer I've talked to that has a similar story, which is really kind of great. But I feel like we reveal so much about ourselves so early, what's really baked into our personalities. So to me, I read that you were like an intense little dude that really wanted to be taken seriously. Does that sound right?
Arvin Ahmadi: That sounds a hundred percent, right. I was so eager to grow up. I mean, thinking about it, I think that's why I have in all my books, all my YA novels, they're like teenagers surrounded by adults just because I was so ready to immerse myself in those worlds. In a world of older accomplished people who I thought at least had all of their stuff together, who knew what they were doing. Spoiler alert, no one does.
Sarah Enni: I know the secret of being grown up. And that brings us to you running away when you were 16. I don't know, that that's just so fascinating to me. And obviously kids running away is a theme that comes back in your work. So it seems like it maybe left an impression on you or maybe that's a feeling that you really still connect with in some way.
Arvin Ahmadi: It is, yeah. Because I ran away in a sense too when I was 18 years old and went off to college in New York City. I've run away multiple times since then when I've gone off on writing retreats in Rome, or staying with a friend in Helsinki for a couple of months cause he had a spare bedroom. So yeah, I think we're all constantly running away, even if we don't necessarily know or can pinpoint what we're running away from. So I love it as a theme because it's often in running away that we find ourselves. Right?
Sarah Enni: Right, right. I want to ask about college and I kind of want you to lead me through how writing was a part of your life in college and in your past life in tech, as you said. And how it came back as something you wanted to take more seriously.
Arvin Ahmadi: So that's the thing, even when I was 10, 11 years old, I was a voracious reader and I had this tutor encouraging me to write stories, write books and I was querying agents. I did want to be an author, but I didn't see it as a career path. I never once considered that as a job that I could have as a real adult, just because it wasn't in my world of possibilities.
I had Iranian parents who had sacrificed a lot to come here. They were really typical in the sense that they wanted me to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer. They wanted me to have a comfortable life. And so, I never stopped writing necessarily, but I found other ways to do it and made it a hobby.
And then the next stage of my writer journey happened in high school when I got involved in the high school newspaper. I got really into investigative journalism and feature writing just because those are absolutely a form of storytelling and they're rooted in real life. I remember whenever anyone asked me in elementary school what I like to read, I responded with realistic fiction.
I don't know what it is about me that I just can't - other than like Harry Potter - which I think Harry Potter is the exception for so many people, the way that like Taylor Swift is the exception. I don't listen to fantasy, but I love Taylor Swift. Or sorry, I don't listen to country. Imagine if you could listen to a genre.
Sarah Enni: The best mashup of those two things ever.
Arvin Ahmadi: Yeah. Like I don't listen to fantasy, but I love a good horror. But yeah, no. I mean, with the exception of Harry Potter, I was a pretty strict realistic fiction, contemporary fiction, the occasional historical fiction novel, but stories rooted in our world. So journalism in high school actually made perfect sense. And that continued with me through college.
And in college I expanded, I got involved in my college paper and I wasn't just writing news and features, but I was also writing opinion pieces, blog posts and I even got into photography and spent a couple of semesters as a photographer for my school newspaper. Which is another fascinating medium for storytelling.
Sarah Enni: And as you say, I'm reminded still of, I also did Geo Cities. I feel like I even built a website cause I always used like Geo Cities or WordPress. So I've never got too far into HTML.
Arvin Ahmadi: Oh no, same!
Sarah Enni: There is a method of storytelling there too, right? The page comes up, "What story do I want to tell? Where are people's eyes gonna go?" I mean, just thinking about your audience while you're framing something. I see the connection in all those things.
Arvin Ahmadi: Absolutely. One of my favorite descriptions of the editorial process, I think it's Cheryl Klein, she's an editor at Lee & Low. And she described it on a panel once as balancing the author's vision with the reader's needs. And that 'reader's needs' portion, having been a product manager in tech and thinking about where should we place this button and that button and how should we lay out the page? That's exactly what's going on when you're building a website on Geo Cities or creating an app.
You have this vision for what the website or app should be for what you want it to do, but users behave in a certain way, and you need to cater it to their behavior so that your vision comes across most clearly. And so it's the exact same thing in writing a story, balancing the author's vision with the reader's needs.
Sarah Enni: I also heard that you changed your major in college like seven times. Is that true?
Arvin Ahmadi: Yeah.
Sarah Enni: I'm not just here to drag you in this conversation, by the way. But I think these are interesting things.
Arvin Ahmadi: No, drag away. These are all things I've stated publicly on the record and you're being a good journalist. I gotta respect that. Respect the hustle. Yeah, I changed my major a lot. I went into college thinking I was gonna study sustainable development and economics just because I remember I was really passionate about that my senior year of high school.
I got really into these economists like Jeffrey Sachs and Joe Stiglitz, who I felt were more socially minded and progressive. But at the same time, their socially mindedness was rooted in rigid economics, and like a left brain way of thinking. And so I thought, at the time, I was like, "Okay, this is what I'm gonna study in school. Columbia is a great school for that. This is how I will merge my desire to do good with like my left brain interests in numbers."
And then, I'm a naturally curious and interested in a lot of things kind of person. And so I got to school and that just kept switching. I was like, "What about math? What about history?" And by the end I landed on computer science. It was tough because they encourage you to explore so much your freshman year of college, but I also think there is such a thing as too much exploration and that's a little bit what I was doing. I was just hopping around instead of really taking seriously, like, "What does this mean for a career or what can I do with this major?"
Sarah Enni: That's really interesting. I mean, what you ended up doing was political science and one other thing, I forget?
Arvin Ahmadi: And computer science. Yeah. I just did all the sciences. I remember I would joke that Bill Nye had had nothing on me.
Sarah Enni: What made you settle with those? That's like so interesting to me.
Arvin Ahmadi: In high school, for a while, wanted to go into politics. I was really passionate about it. I worked on campaigns and worked for a Congressman for a summer, I interned for a Congressman for a summer. And so it was hard to shake that interest even though studying political science in college is a totally different beast. Being into politics growing up just meant that I cared about people. It meant that I cared about the issues. It meant that I wanted to be active, didn't want to be apathetic But studying political science, studying political theory, it's theoretical. Right? So that didn't exactly stick.
And then with computer science, I loved the logic around it, I loved the creation element. But again, this is just what happens when you dive deep into any subject, it got pretty theoretical. That's never been my thing. I've always been much more of a doer than an exploring the theory and the nitty gritty of something.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, yeah. I have a preoccupation with tech and Silicon Valley and you and I are speaking the same week that four of the biggest names in tech went before Congress. And so people are talking about this a lot and I'm really fascinated by the industry. So I'm just curious about your time there and how you feel about the tech industry?
Arvin Ahmadi: Yeah, I mean, look, the tech industry absolutely has its issues, right? And I think that was a little bit why I left. I mostly left just because book stuff started to take off and that was my real passion that I wanted to at least try. But I still love tech deeply because, as an industry, it's so forward-thinking. And they think really big and they're not really like bogged down by constructs, you know? By constructs and rules and all the, I guess, old ways of thinking that might hinder other industries.
And so I think that was important to me when I was thinking about, I had parents who were really big on getting a graduate degree and going into a field like law or engineering or medicine, which were very rigid and structured. And then similarly, I had wanted to go into politics for so long. Even when I was thinking about sustainable development and economics, those were still a path towards a political career. But when I was thinking about going into politics, I was closeted, you know?
And something happened where I guess I decided that if I was going to come out of the closet, then I could not pursue that career in politics. And it wasn't just coming out of the closet, it was the overall realization that a politician, especially like I wanted to be a senator, had to behave a certain way, talk a certain way, love a certain way. Right? And it was around when I was 18, 19 - towards the end of my freshman year - I decided I didn't want to be that person.
And come to think of it, this whole history is all coming back to me, it was because of an internship that I was doing. I was supposed to intern at the White House that summer. That was really exciting to me. I was really, really excited to have that internship, but I ended up losing it. After I'd already gotten it, and I'd filled out all the forms, the on-boarding, all of that, I was then informed that I would not be able to participate in internship. And it was because of something that I had put down, like a minor thing that I put down on my security clearance. And I remember I had lunch with my mentor after I found out about this, and he was like, "Oh, that?"
I guess it's 2020, so I can talk about this pretty openly now. I said that I had smoked weed one time, which was the truth. Like at 19 years old, I had smoked one time my freshman year. And this is when Obama was in office. I remember even Obama had talked about how he'd had that experience. And I just was so moved and uplifted that a politician was able to be that candid. And so I was like, "You know what? This is great. I'm gonna be transparent too."
My morals, my religion, all of these things that always encouraged me to be completely honest, no BS. And so I did that on my forms. I lost this internship that I was so excited about. And my mentor, who I was gonna be working with at that office, basically told me like, "Oh my God, why did you put that down? You didn't have to write that."
And that was just such a turnoff. And I think that ultimately is what appealed to me so much about tech that, unlike all these other industries where you have to put on a certain image - and maybe even lie a little bit to get ahead - in tech you're allowed to be yourself, in all of the ways. And I liked that. And I always attributed that to why Silicon Valley was such a fast-paced, disruptive industry.
I think about this often, because in politics specifically, I think about how in 20 years, the people running for office, there's gonna be so much that can be dug up about them. And that, I think, is gonna disqualify a lot of really qualified, really smart people who want to do good, who genuinely want to do good, but they may not have the right past for that.
And that's such a shame because tech, Silicon Valley, they care less about your resume. They care less about your past and just more about what you want to do. The quality of your work and the quality of your ambition. So, I think this is a long-winded way of saying I became disillusioned by politics and got really into technology cause it was just this like big welcoming space.
Sarah Enni: I'm glad that we covered that because your perspective in tech, and it being a welcoming space, and what I'm also hearing is self-expression, right? You didn't want to be in a place where that was gonna be limited.
Arvin Ahmadi: Where I couldn't be myself, yeah. Cause again, it wasn't just that little forum, it was also just the fact that I'd come out and I thought that by coming out, I was not allowed to be a Senator. I could not dream of getting elected to public office anymore. It kind of squashed that dream.
Sarah Enni: Which is completely heartbreaking. I think you and I are around the same age and it's wild to even think back to then, you at that time, things are different. Things are changing. They're not perfect, by far and away, but back then it was, you know, Obama mid - I always forget - mid-presidency is when he changed his tune on gay marriage. It's just so wild.
Arvin Ahmadi: I know how much has changed.
Sarah Enni: Okay. I swear, we're gonna talk about your books. Lead us to Down and Across. I'd love for you to kind of lead me to how you started taking writing more seriously and the genesis story for your debut novel.
Arvin Ahmadi: So it really started senior year of college. My senior year, I was about to graduate with a CS degree and go off and get a job. And I remember I just kind of hit another fork in the road. I had full time offer at a big tech company, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to take it, you know? I thought maybe I wanted to go explore a startup route. And around the same time, I was uncertain about that. I had also failed my first college class and that did not go over well with my Persian parents, you know?
And so basically I got this big lecture about how I was always quitting things or changing my mind or just wasn't able to stick with something and follow through. And around the same time that I got that lecture, I had watched a video, a Ted Talk, by Angela Duckworth. She gave a Ted Talk that was viewed millions of times, like went viral, and it was all about grit. And how the number one indicator of success was not your IQ, was not where you went to school, it was your grit. It was your ability to stick with something and really follow through on it. Even when it got hard, even when you failed time after time again.
And that was scary for me because I'd basically just been told, in so many words, that I wasn't gritty. That this thing that is the secret to success, that is the most important indicator of success, I did not have. And so, out of that came my desire to write this book. Where I started thinking about all the other times in my life I'd quit or given up. And the two moments that came to mind specifically were when I was 10 years old and I wrote this book, Jack and Skipper. I wrote a few chapters and queried some agents, but then gave up when none of them wanted to offer me representation and went on to write poetry.
So, ten-year-old me quit his book. And then 16 year old me, when I was 16 I ran away from home, and I can't even remember why I ran away. Like classic teenager. I got into so many dumb arguments with my parents that I guess one of them just tipped me over the edge enough that I decided to like, I literally escaped through the window. A 16 year old arbitrarily could have just gone through the door, but no, I had to be dramatic AF and like open the window and escape through the window with like the wind blowing in the curtains.
And then I took a bus to D.C. And I felt free. I was free for like eight or nine hours. I sat under a tree, I pondered my existence. I did all the things. But then night fell and I was like, "Oh wait, I don't have anywhere to sleep." And so that's when I found a payphone and called my parents. And I was like, "Dad, can you pick me up?" So, I mean, thinking back on that too, I was like, "Wow, I couldn't even run away without doing my thing and giving up." You know?
And so yeah, that book I wrote when I was 10 and that attempted runaway when I was 16 came to my mind and I decided to write a book. Oh! And the third piece, the final piece, was that I was also reading a lot of YA at the time. I have a little sister and she was in high school when I was a college senior. And so she was feeding me all of these YA novels that I was loving, that got me out of this fiction slump that I had been in for five or six years.
I think it was like junior year of high school when I got really busy with AP exams and SATs that I just stopped reading fiction. And I didn't really pick it back up until my senior year of college when my little sister was feeding me all these YA books. So the idea for Down and Across just came out of all these places. That 10 year old book, that 16 year old runaway, and then this 21 year old me who felt a certain way about this Ted Talk on grit.
And Down and Across became a runaway story about a boy who runs away to meet a fictionalized version of Angela Duckworth, Cecily Mallard.
[Both laugh]
Sarah Enni: I love it.
Arvin Ahmadi: I know, right on the nose. And he wants to get gritty. He runs away to meet this professor to find out how he can save himself and get gritty.
Sarah Enni: And I love that you were reading books that your sister gave you, to YA. And it does feel like we are talking about, though you were older than that when you wrote the book, it's a question of identity and a lot of huge questions that teens are facing. And you also were able to write an Iranian-American character.
Arvin Ahmadi: Yeah. Although that didn't happen until later. I mean, originally Scott was Jack. I basically picked up where I left off and wrote a white protagonist with all my issues. I just thought that's the way he's supposed to look like in the fiction and the books that I was reading. Because I remember I'd read The Fault in Our Stars and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and a lot of John Green's other books. As well as re-read The Catcher in the Rye, which is like the classic runaway story, and I just loved that as a teenager. All those characters were white. All those protagonists were white. So I just felt like that was the way to do it.
Sarah Enni: Wow. At what point in the process did you make the change?
Arvin Ahmadi: It was early on, but with a caveat. I think around 50 or 60 pages in realized I was inserting so much of myself into this runaway story that I was like, "Okay, he needs to have at least one immigrant parent." And so I made Jack Scott, and I made him half-Indian, half-white.
And I thought of that as a way to stay within these rules that I thought were like the rules of writing a novel, of YA. That your character has to be white, or at least white passing, but still be able to inject my experience in there. And so I wrote pretty much the entire first draft, after that initial detour, I wrote the entire first draft with Scott as a half-Indian half-white kid.
And thankfully, I shared that draft with a couple of friends and one of them worked in publishing. We were friends in college and she was an editorial assistant at a publisher at the time. And she read that draft and she told me, "Arvin, this is clearly you. And this is a very autobiographical, very personal novel. Why don't we just make the character Iranian?"
And she said that with the context that like, "This is okay now." This was 2014, 2015-ish. So diverse stories were really starting to pick up and become more accepted in mainstream publishing. And so it was kind of eye-opening to have this friend in publishing - she wasn't on the kid lit side, she was on the adult side - but still she had enough know-how, was in the industry enough, to know that like, "You need to be able to tell me, you can make him Iranian. And you'll be able to sell this book with an Iranian character, because it was just so you."
Sarah Enni: Do you remember how you felt thinking about that or hearing that?
Arvin Ahmadi: It meant that a fictional character was allowed to be very much like me. Which, growing up, I loved stories and I always related to the weirdo story. But it's nice when the weirdo is allowed to look like you and have a culture and a background similar to yours.
Sarah Enni: I'm gonna ask about Girl Gone Viral and then How it All Blew Up, and ask about themes over the books together as well. So, you were really serious writing Down and Across. You had some friends look at it. At what point did things start to move into, "I'm selling this book and this is really happening?" What was that whole process like?
Arvin Ahmadi: It was one of those projects that, when I started to write Down and Across, I just wanted to finish it, you know? Cause it was kind of like a test of my grit. And so my only goal, at the beginning, was to reach the last page. But then once I finished it, I was still reading YA, and I also actually started to attend YA events in the city. And so that's when I was like, "Well maybe I can polish this up and query agents. Because I think this could be published."
And so, it took me about a year to write the first draft, but then I spent another year in editing the book and pretty much rewriting it. But I still didn't think that I would ever become an 'author' author. I just wanted to get an agent, sell the book, but do that on the side and stick with my very stable, very practical tech job. And even after I sold the book and I made the decision to quit my job, it was still only a temporary thing in my head.
I sold the book in a two-book deal. And so I was like, "All right. I have this idea for a near futuristic Silicon Valley book. I'm gonna leave my tech job for six months, bang out this book and then come back into tech and have my again, stable, practical career." Cause that way of thinking, had just been so hard-coded into my head. But first of all, much easier said than done. Banging out a book in six months? It took a lot longer than six months.
And second of all, I had more ideas and I really loved writing full-time and being an author full-time. And it's just such a fulfilling career that six months turned into a year, turned into, "This is what I want to do for the rest of my life."
Sarah Enni: Well, you led us to Girl Gone Viral. So I do want to ask about that. Do you mind pitching that book for us?
Arvin Ahmadi: So Girl Gone Viral is, if Down and Across is my love letter to D.C., Girl Gone Viral is my love letter to tech. It's about a 17 year old girl, Opal Hopper, who is a brilliant coder and goes to a boarding school in Silicon Valley for, basically, tech prodigies. Her dad went missing when she was 10 years old. And now at 17, this contest has popped up that she decides to enter only because the winner of the contest gets to meet, in her mind, suspect number one for why her dad went missing. Who's this like big elusive tech billionaire.
And so she enters this contest. She doesn't win it, but she goes viral as a result of the contest. And it basically sets off this spiral of even more hacking, lies, and deception. It's a little bit Black Mirror-ish. It's a little bit The Social Network-y in the sense that it's a very brilliant coder who is not exactly the best with people, but who gets thrust into the spotlight and then has to deal with all the attention.
Sarah Enni: And you just describing the book and then saying that it took longer than six months to write I'm like, "Yeah, you put yourself... that is a real challenge." It's like a mystery in a near future speculative fiction.
Arvin Ahmadi: I know. Honestly, it's funny. Cause that one, I did write the first draft in six months, but then it took over a year to actually edit. And some very heavy, very painful edits. And then, I'm thinking back to like my third book, I wrote the first draft in like three months, but then I spent a very long time editing that one. Like completely rewrote it. So it's funny how my drafting time has lessened, but I now pay so much more emphasis and importance on revision.
Sarah Enni: I think that's what becomes real so fast, right? Is, writing is not writing, editing is writing.
Arvin Ahmadi: Yeah!
Sarah Enni: It's so true. Okay, well I really want us to get to How it All Blew Up and then we can kind of tie things together. But you said the first deal was a two book deal. So when did you have the idea for How it All Blew Up? Or was that the next project? How did that kind of come about?
Arvin Ahmadi: So How it All Blew Up was kind of an unexpected book because after I finished Girl Gone Viral, I was still writing full-time and waiting for that book to come out. And I decided that I wanted to travel somewhere to work on my third book. Just because with Girl Gone Viral, I unexpectedly got to write that in Helsinki because, as I'd mentioned earlier, a friend had a spare bedroom.
He and his girlfriend had just moved to Helsinki. They had a two bedroom apartment and one of the bedrooms was a guest bedroom. So they just hit me up and they were like, "We know you're writing full-time. Do you want to come be our writer-in-residence?" And I said, "Sure!" And it was awesome because this was like Helsinki in the dead of winter.
So it was actually quite inspirational to write this tech thriller, this dark, noir-y tech thriller, in the dead of winter in Finland. And so I wanted kind of a similar experience for my third book. And this was 2018 when Call Me By Your Name, had just come out. And Aziz Ansari had just put out season two of Master of None which opens in Italy.
And I remember in thinking about where I wanted to go I was like, "Well, you know, Call Me By Your Name is set in Italy. And Master of None was set in Italy." Like I basically decided that I had to go to Rome because Rome was where my gay side and my Brown side were meant to converge. It was like a Call Me By Your Name... Aziz, Elio mashup I didn't know I needed, basically.
And so I very arbitrarily picked Rome. And also it's Italy. I'd never in my life been to Italy. And there's just this romantic idea of getting to write and live in Italy for any amount of time. And so I was planning to spend a couple of months there, to spend the summer there. And that's the nice thing about being 25 years old. I was living with roommates in the city, but I wasn't bogged down by a relationship or a mortgage or anything like that. So I basically rented out my room and found a tiny little apartment in Rome.
And that was a consideration where I was like, "When else in my life am I gonna get to do this?" I don't want to be one of those people who looks back on their twenties and is like, "Why didn't I travel more? Why didn't I take more risks? Why didn't I take advantage of the fact that I was basically, effectively, untethered?"
So I picked up and went to Rome. But the plan was to write a completely different book. The plan was to write a multi-generational American dream story. And that's what I wanted to sell to my publisher, Penguin, as my third novel. But long story short, Rome happened and a lot of the events and the friendships of How it All Blew Up, happened in my own life very quickly, and changed my life very drastically. By the end of the summer, I was like, "Oh no, this is the story that I want to write."
Sarah Enni: And just so that we can kind of dive into some of the details of the book, spoiler free, but do you mind pitching How it All Blew Up for us?
Arvin Ahmadi: So How it All Blew Up is about 18 year old Amir Azadi, who is gay and Iranian and on the day of his high school graduation, Amir runs away from home. He runs away because he's been blackmailed by these boys at school who found out about a secret relationship of his. And they pretty much have given him an ultimatum, "Get us this money by graduation day or we'll out you to your parents."
So Amir runs away and through a series of events he ends up in Rome. And in Rome, he basically stumbles into this friend group very similar to a way that I stumbled into a friend group when I was in Italy for that summer. And these people are so inviting, so friendly, and take Amir under their wing. And he starts to become more comfortable in his own skin.
He's finally hanging out with other gay people and seeing what life can be like as an out and proud gay person. An important part of that is this friend Jihan that he needs, who is half-Iranian and extremely loud and proud and flamboyant. He's just as much Iranian as he is gay and he is proud of those two sides of him. These two sides that Amir had always seen as separate, that he always had a wall between.
The twist in the story of course, is that on page one, you meet Amir in an airport interrogation room because his family has found him in Italy. And they found him and they all got in a plane, but they got into a big fight on the airplane. And so on page one, he and his family are in separate interrogation rooms at JFK, and they're all telling their side of the story to the airport officers.
And so the story hops back and forth between these airport interrogation room monologues that mostly come from Amir, but also come from his mom, dad, and sister. And then of course the romantic life-changing, life-affirming summer in Italy stories.
Sarah Enni: I would love to hear, to whatever extent you're comfortable talking about it, this realization that the gay part of yourself and the Brown part of yourself can be happily one public person. What was your experience with coming to that realization? Anything you'd love to say about that I just think that's so fascinating.
Arvin Ahmadi: You know, I think Iran gets a bad rap because it's a Muslim country, and certainly things have changed since the revolution. But when people think of Iran they think of Ahmadinejad and specifically, they might think about how he once said there are no gay people in Iran. That Iran is one of the few countries where you can still be punished by death for being gay.
And so I think that's just the stereotype of a culture like that. And it's so far from the truth. And I say this from Amir's perspective because of two things. Amir Is actively telling a story in the airport interrogation room. And so even though he feels like he's not allowed to be Iranian and gay, that he has to keep those two sides of himself very separate. What he sort of realizes as the story goes on is that Iranians have this rich, thousands of years, this very rich, old tradition of oral storytelling. And he's actively participating in that tradition.
So just outside of the gay thing, he realizes that in telling the story of his very gay, very romp-y summer in Italy, he's participating in a tried-and-true Iranian tradition. But the second part is that, Iranians are brave. When you think about Iranian history, when you think about the stories that we tell, when you think about our heroes and our Kings, we're a brave, proud people.
So it was this realization and seeing this person Jihan, who was so flamboyant and talking all about queer icons like Joni Mitchell and Nina Simone. And I watched RuPaul's Drag Race with him and his friends. Who at the same time, was able to be so proud of Iranian culture, because that's what this culture, that's what this history is really about.
It's being forward-thinking, being progressive. It's about social justice. I learned that the Cyrus scroll, one of the Iranian Kings, was one of the first human rights document, that kind of to create all people of all races and religions as being equal. And so I think it's when you really inspect a culture, you see that it's so much more than its modern day stereotypes. And so that, for me, was a big takeaway and something that... when we say, "You have to write a book for yourself," that was something that I really took away from this story. And that got me to merge those two sides.
Of course the biggest thing it's always representation, right? It was seeing this person, seeing this person, Jihan, as a mirror, as someone who is so proudly both of those things. But then I think on the deeper level, it's also really examining my culture, really examining what it means to be Iranian of that culture or any culture really. And recognizing that it's so much more than the stereotypes that people might have, and that you might have bought into.
That's the worst part. I realized that I had fully bought into those stereotypes and thought that those two sides can't coexist. That I thought that being Iranian, that Iranian culture and homophobia were married when that is so not the case.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, the internalized stuff. It's funny to hear you talk about that. I'd love to hear, Down and Across you wrote about yourself, but also kind of a veil over it and Girl Gone Viral, of course, is pretty different. But it sounds like How it All Blew Up, I've heard you elsewhere say that it's a very, in some ways, autobiographical book. This really sounds like it's like very true to life for you.
Arvin Ahmadi: Yeah. I mean, the original title of How it All Blew Up was Out With a Bang because I saw it as my own very public coming out. And in fact I was tired. So another stereotype, and I guess this is a stereotype in that it does happen a lot in Persian culture is that we were really, really good at brushing awkward thorny issues under the rug, you know? And so even having come out in college and then coming out to my family when I was like around 21 or 22, I still didn't feel comfortable talking about it. I never tweeted about being gay. I wouldn't have gone onto podcasts like this and talked about it, just because it was, it's a prickly, unsavory, taboo subject.
And especially with my mom, at the time, the response was, "We love you, but just don't talk about it." And so I think by deciding to write this book, deciding to tell this story, the original title, Out With A Bang, was just very clearly stating like, "This is me coming out, out. There's no question now. There's no hiding. I want to be able to talk about this and talk about it publicly and not feel that shame of hiding." Because if everything in the world... this is like a very draconian way of thinking, that if everything is pride or shame, then by not talking about something, you are sacrificing that pride. And instead, giving into that shame.
So I didn't want to give into the shame anymore, even if I was out and dating. Because that's what led to me having these two lives, right? Going on dates and having gay friends in New York, but then coming home and being a good Iranian boy who didn't talk about that icky subject.
Initially it was a very personal thing that I did for myself. So it's interesting to think about how the title progressed, because originally it was Out With a Bang and then at one point it was Amir Drops a Bomb because that was a political decision, which I decided did not need to be the title and instead I would talk about it. Because I just thought about the double standard of like, he has this big secret.
And if the title were like, Chris Drops a Bomb, you'd be like, "Oh, Chris has like a juicy secret." But instead, Amir Drops a Bomb, your mind goes to a certain place. So I wanted to talk about that double standard a little bit, but of course it didn't need to be the title. I didn't want to deter people with a title like that. So I finally made it Out With a Bang. But I think those two titles represent the very personal and eventually very political missions that I had for this book.
Sarah Enni: And it's always so interesting to hear about other titles. Those are both great titles and so is How it All Blew Up. So I feel like you had a wealth of riches there. And to your point of this being very explicitly like, "Let's talk about all of these issues and how they are interacting in Amir's life, and in the life of Amir's family." You mentioned it, that the narrative structure of the book is in and out of these conversations in an interrogation room, Amir and his sister and mother and his father.
I found it to be so interesting. It was such a clever way to hop through time a little bit, fill in the plot that you needed and build tension, about you don't know where he's gonna be going in Italy and what's gonna happen there. Was that always there? How did you kind of mess with that from a narrative standpoint?
Arvin Ahmadi: It was very much always there to the point where the first draft of the book was actually written entirely as a dramatic monologue from Amir's point of view. So those little monologues that you got from him, that was the whole story in the first draft. It was in that second person, "I'm telling you a story and occasionally I'll comment on your reactions."
And that was born out of a book that I read when I was in Rome The Reluctant Fundamentalist. So The Reluctant Fundamentalist is by Mohsin Hamid and it's brilliant, brilliant novel about a Pakistani man who was educated in America, but then you meet him in Pakistan when he's telling the story of his life to another man that he meets at a cafe. So it's entirely narrated in the second person, it's entirely a dramatic monologue and it should so brilliantly crafted.
And so that inspired me to tell this story in the interrogation room, because I talk about having had this incredible summer in Rome, well, towards the end of the summer I got stopped at an airport. I was traveling to visit a friend in another country and I got stopped and pretty much asked what I was doing in Italy for two months, you know? And the officer at first seemed really nice, but then grew increasingly specific and even hostile in her questioning.
I started to tell the story of my time in Italy. I find myself in effect telling her like, "Oh no, no, no, no. You clearly think that I'm this threat. But I'm not. I'm a gay man who's been in Italy for the whole summer and spending time with all these other gay men in Trastevere at this bar in these piazzas.
And so I was trying to paint myself as this like model minority, which when I thought about it after the fact, I was like, "Well, that's really messed up." That I felt the need to emphasize how westernized I was by saying like, "You know, I was hanging out with my gay friends," like 'wink, wink,’ “At these bars.” Like, "Don't worry, I am super safe."
So that was where the original idea to have a second person narrate it as a monologue story came from because I felt like it could illustrate how I struggled with that. The way that I felt like I needed to perform in that situation versus how I actually feel about the model minority myth.
Sarah Enni: Right, and to me it struck me as such an effective way to talk about - and this is my perspective as a reader who doesn't share your identity - but because Amir is struggling to find acceptance with his family and it was such an effective way to say his family is not only concerned about Amir they are concerned about how the story that they tell about themselves to other people, and how they are perceived not only to other Iranian families but to Americans and to authority figures, it was really interplayed.
And then of course, for me as a reader who is white, as you say, second person. So a lot of it was like, "I am being explicitly addressed by this narrative." And then I get to dive into Amir's head and really experience things. I really dug it. I thought it was really, really interesting.
Arvin Ahmadi: And it developed as I wrote, as I got deeper into the writing process, cause like I said, originally it was Amir's perspective. But I realized that there's this generational divide too, between how Amir and his little sister talk to the officers versus how their mom and dad talk. And that also just has to do with, we hear this all the time, that Generation Z is all about authenticity and that we are less and less willing to put up these artificial walls.
To kind of pretend to be people that we're not. And yet, in certain cultures and I think older generations, it's a survival mechanism, right? Like Amir's mom and dad are more polite, are less candid, because they have to be. Because they don't have the privilege of being young and of not having an accent, especially Amir's dad who has this prior experience with customs from right after 9/11.
I wanted to get into that a little bit too. I don't think I ever really - maybe towards the end - I think Sariah, especially, because Amir's little sister is very spunky. She maybe addresses it directly in a line or two. But for the most part I wanted that to be a subtle commentary. That even this Muslim family, they're not all treated the same way and they're not exactly the same level of candidate. Some of them are more forthcoming than others.
Sarah Enni: And you were able to do so much by how the dialogue differentiates. I also just have to say I'm obsessed with Sariah. She was so funny. She was like, "This is really holding me up from being up Cats practice."
[Both laugh]
Arvin Ahmadi: She was such a fun character to write. Just imagine a 13 year old diva, a theater diva, in that room. And in the same room as her mom who is very composed and takes it very seriously because she knows how the world works. But Sariah doesn't, she's obviously has a more ideal way of thinking about these things. So she's very much herself.
Sarah Enni: Awesome. Oh my gosh. It's been so fun to talk to you Arvin. I always wrap up with advice. So, I would love to ask if you have advice for someone who is looking to write a story this personal and that could impact their life. You took a big risk personally and as an author in moving forward with this story and I would love to hear, have you learned anything yet that you could pass on to people? Or what are your thoughts on that?
Arvin Ahmadi: Honestly my biggest piece of advice would be first and foremost write for yourself. Publishing is already an industry with no guarantees. There's so much that's uncertain both in writing and in eventually publishing your book. And that doubles when you're writing a very specific experience, right? These specific experiences, these marginalized experiences that publishing hasn't really seen before, there are absolutely no guarantees as to what that book can be or do.
And so you have to own that audience of one. With How it All Blew Up, no matter what happens, no matter how many readers this book reaches or doesn't reach - and I hope that number is a lot. I hope that it reaches the readers who need it the most and that's really my top priority - but no matter what happens, I'm really proud of this book because I wrote it for myself because it was my out with the bang. So I think that all comes down to like, "Write the story you can't not write, and write it exactly your way."
Sarah Enni: I love that. I think that's really wonderful advice. As you say, someone listening to this could be hearing that at just the right time, so that's huge. Awesome. Well, oh my gosh, thank you for giving me so much time today. This has been such a treat and please go turn on your AC and enjoy the rest of your evening.
Arvin Ahmadi: Will do.
Sarah Enni: This has been great. Thank you, Arvin.
Arvin Ahmadi: Thank you Sarah.
Thank you so much to Arvin. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @ArvinAhmadi and follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). A quick and easy way that you can support First Draft is to subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening right now. And if you have a couple minutes, leaving a rating or review on Apple podcasts really goes a long way.
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