BROWN ALBUM

A collection of incisive essays about hyphenated identity.

These essays, writes Khakpour, “are a testament to the greatest and worst experience of my life: being a spokesperson for my people, a role I never dreamed of and never asked for. This is my pigeonhole, and this is my legacy….These pieces are my bridge, and they are my cave.” The author, who has also published two novels and a memoir about her battle with Lyme disease and chronic misdiagnosis, is clearly—and understandably—uncomfortable with the mantle of “Miss Literary Iranian America,” as she sardonically refers to it. In the penultimate essay, “How To Write Iranian America, or The Last Essay,” she traces the arc of her career, from fledgling writer who initially refused to focus on identity to New York Times contributor whose prolific output depends on her ability to “write an essay on absolutely anything for these people, provided that it’s about Iranian America—which it will be.” Consequently, in the Times and elsewhere, Khakpour has churned her way through “Islamic Revolution Barbie,” reality TV with a Persian twist, the Islamic New Year, and other topics to appease the American appetite for the Iranian “other.” In the final, titular piece, which she notes was never intended for publication, the author writes about how, “like a worm,” the essay “grew inside me until it could not be contained.” It’s identity confusion, about which stories we chose to tell about ourselves, and about being brown in a country more blindingly white under Donald Trump. “This is an essay that many of my own people would tell me to go kill myself for,” writes the author, “because I deny the whiteness they claim….I want to remind those who can claim whiteness that they are a very small group.”

Provocative pieces that detonate many notions of identity.