I spoke with Marjan Kamali about her award-winning bestselling terrific novel, The Lion Women of Tehran. Above all, this book is a great story. It traces the lives of two childhood friends in Tehran in the 1950’s who come from very different backgrounds, and yet their bond seems indestructible.
We follow these two girls, Homa and Ellie as adventurous, playful seven-year-olds through to adolescence and young adulthood and beyond. We learn about their hopes and dreams, losses and struggles, joys and sorrows. And we read about how the seemingly indestructible friendship is jeopardized by a single act of betrayal.
Marjan’s writing makes me feel like I am smack in the middle of these neighbourhoods, uptown, downtown, the schools, the bizarre, the parties. I felt the freedom these girls enjoyed walking down the street in their stylish clothes in the sixties and seventies with their beehive hairdos. This makes the eighties after the revolution in 1979 when Iranian women lost all those freedoms that much more painful. The new government listens in on phone calls, reads private letters, spies, imprisons protesters. Importantly, Marjan is careful to keep the turbulent and violent times in the background of her story, while the tale of how these young girls grew up to become amazing women is always in the foreground.
Below are some edited abbreviated highlights from our conversation. You can listen to the full Q&A here on my podcast Elena Meets the Author.
Elena: Marjan, hello and welcome to the show.
Marjan: Hello, Elena. Thank you so much for having me.
Elena: I am so happy to have you. I got lost in the world of these girls as they grew up and their friendship blossomed and then was severely tested. It’s all about the story. It’s a great way to learn about history without really realizing you’re learning about history, if you know what I mean.
Marjan: That’s the best way to learn about history. I really think books save us. They keep us grounded and they keep us tethered. And stories for me are the best way to learn about the news and history because you get a deeper perspective, a deeper education. I could read an article in the newspaper, and I can read the headlines, but when I read a book, I’m immersed in the story, I really feel like I get to know that world.
You can time travel through books. There’s also a lot of therapy in reading because you feel less alone and you see how other people have felt what you felt, even if they live on the other side of the planet. It’s just a very immersive and healing experience.
Elena: I read that you were working on another story when the idea for this novel came to you. Can you tell us about that?
Yes. After, my second novel, The Stationery Shop came out my career changed because that book was a bestseller, and I felt under great pressure to write the next one. I had written over a hundred pages of this other novel about moms in suburbia and firstborns going off to college.
But when the pandemic happened, I found some posts on Instagram of my own childhood friend and seeing her face again just brought back so many memories for me. I was flooded with not just memories but emotions. I felt as though I could remember the texture of our friendship. I could remember her mom. I remembered how we used to play together every day and share our dreams. And I realized how these friendships we make in childhood really shape us because. Her influence on my life has lasted even though the friendship hasn’t. And so, I just thought again about how friendship breakups are just as heart wrenching as romantic ones.
Except we don’t have as many songs for them although my daughter tells me Taylor Swift does.
Elena: lol
But what I knew in my heart then was that I really wanted to write the story of a broken friendship. So, I had to take a deep breath, put aside that other book that I had started to write, and that’s when I started The Lion Women of Tehran.
I made up Ellie and Homa. And I deliberately made them born the year my mother was born -1943- because by doing that, I could show the arc in the background of the women’s rights movement in Iran.
The Women’s Rights Movement in Iran officially began in the 1920s. That’s when the first women’s rights organizations began. So, throughout the twenties, thirties, forties, women were working hard organizing. And then in Iran, a lot changed in the fifties, which coincides with Ellie and Homa’s burgeoning friendship and their girlhood.
And then as they come of age in the sixties, women got the right to vote, and then a lot of laws which were harmful to women changed to benefit them, such as the age of marriage, divorce laws, child custody laws, a lot of things. And so, we see as Ellie and Homa become women, how their womanhood sort of echoes this expanded world.
And then in the seventies, so much of that freedom is taken for granted, but then those rights are later taken away. So that’s a movement in the background. But the core of the story is this friendship between these two girls who later grow up to become women.
Elena: I really loved the beginning when they become friends age seven, playing hopscotch, that annoying boy, spirited Homa doing pranks on studious Ellie. It was all so believable. We all were seven at one point.
I feel it’s such a fleeting time in real life. But also, on the page in a lot of adult novels, we don’t spend too much time in girlhood. But I think this time that you’re mentioning – girlhood – is when the sassiness and innocence and confidence is still there in girls before it gets eroded with adolescence and all those insecurities.
It’s such a special time and I really enjoyed writing those scenes and being there with Ellie and Homa, like you said, when they’re playing hopscotch or just having their first ‘play date’ The first time you go to a friend’s house is your foray into the world outside of your family, and that strong bond that you create with a friend sometimes is like a blueprint for later romantic relationships because you are learning how to navigate the world that doesn’t associate you with your own family in any way.
So, when Ellie goes to Homa’s house, it’s really the first time she’s not in a relative’s house. She’s thinking, so this is how this family functions. This is what their kitchen is like. This is what her mother is like. It’s a way to open your eyes to blueprints of family dynamics that you maybe didn’t know existed.
Elena: Totally. Your descriptions of Tehran back in the fifties are so authentic. I imagine your mother must have been a good source.
Yes. It’s always a compliment slash slight shock when a reader writes to me and says, I love how you brought to life your childhood in the 1950s.
Elena: I hate that.
On the one hand, it’s a huge compliment. On the other hand, it’s like, hmm, how old do I look?
I was in a position of privilege because I had access to all these people in my family who had lived In Tehran in the 1950s before I was born. I only lived in Iran for a very short time, so I bugged every known relative, and a lot of people didn’t want to speak to me. They’re like, oh my goodness, enough with the questions. I don’t know, we just did what we did. We lived our lives.
And I’d be like, no, but can you please explain to me what you were wearing and what your shoes looked like? And where in particular did you eat when you were in college? Did you go out? Did you eat in the cafeteria? I bugged a lot of people, but yes, for the Lion Women of Tehran, my mom was my number one victim, and she did speak to me.
So, Ellie and Homa go to my mother’s high school. She described it for me, and I needed to know how were you seated in the classroom? Did you each have a desk? Did you share a desk? Like, tell me about the layout and the teachers. And particularly as you mentioned, I needed to know everything about what they ate because I am a foodie and so it really interested me.
Elena: Homa and Ellie are very different people. Homa is from a modest background. She doesn’t care about wealth. She wants to be a judge. When she grows up, she wants to right unfairness wherever she sees it.
Ellie’s family has a lot more money. Ellie is prettier and Ellie marries Mehrdad, the boy everyone has a crush on and yet Ellie is jealous of Homa from the first time they meet when she sees that Homa is missing her two front teeth. And Ellie wishes she was missing some teeth too. Can you talk about their friendship and what attracted one to the other?
Ellie, to begin with, perhaps by nature or perhaps by the nurture of her narcissistic mother, she has a jealous trait. So, Ellie is almost primed to be jealous. When they’re seven years old in that first scene when they meet, Ellie isn’t that into Homa. She’s like, who is this girl? She’s annoying me. She’s poking me, she’s giggling. Where’s the friend I thought I would meet?
But Ellie can’t help but be won over by Homa because Homa has a characteristic that Ellie covets. Homa is unabashedly herself. She’s comfortable in her skin. She has nothing to hide, nothing to cover. She is not insecure. She’s a confident soul and she believes what she believes. She doesn’t feel as though she needs to adjust or tweak in any way, which Ellie does. So, I think Ellie is very much attracted to Homa’s natural charisma and to Homa’s confidence and how she feels comfortable in her skin.
And what does Homa see in Ellie? Homa has that proverbial heart of gold and maybe she senses Ellie’s discomfort. Maybe Homa is one of those people whose vibrations are tuned to other people’s pretty well, and she sees this girl and she’s nice and she just wants to, basically, initially just wants to play hopscotch.
And then I think she sees a lot of potential in Ellie that’s being unmet and she’s no fool Homa. She knows that Ellie’s family life is worse than hers, even though Ellie ends up having more money and initially had more money. Homa knows Ellie craves having a father and that Ellie deep down wishes she had a different mother. So, I think Homa is just very empathetic and takes Ellie into her fold.
Elena: How did you balance the historical accuracy with the storytelling?
In writing historical fiction, and particularly in writing historical fiction about Iran, I have to be very accurate. So, I did not make up any historical events.
I don’t want to make up a historical event that did not exist for the purposes of my story. So, everything I write about that’s historical happened. Ellie and Homa, I made up their friendship. I made up their families. But the women’s march that happened in Iran in March 1979, I did not make up.
Thousands of women did march in the streets for days on end because they were worried about what may come. And so, the revolution, the war, all those things are historically accurate, and fact checked.
Now here’s what I think about the balance. If you want to read a history book, then you are going to read a history book. There are many excellent history books about what happened in any country.
But if you are reading fiction, I think that a reader wants a story. They’re there for the story and for the characters. So personally, as a writer, I like the historical events to serve as a background and for the relationship between the characters to serve as the foreground. I always think back to what EL Doctorow said, and if I may name drop at this moment, he was my professor at my creative writing MFA program at NYU.
He said history shows us what happened, but fiction shows us how what happened, make people feel. And I am so much more interested in that. How did that make the people feel? How did that affect a friendship? How did that affect a romance? How did that affect a parent-child relationship? That kind of a thing.
Elena: Can we talk about your title, The Lion Women of Tehran. Homa is clearly a lioness as she fights to protect women to the end, but are there other ways to be a lioness, more subtle ways? Would you say the term lioness applies to other characters your book?
Yes, I would. You know, of the two friends, Homa is the easy lion woman because you just look at her. She has a sense of social justice from when she’s a kid. She becomes an activist at a very young age. She sees an injustice; she wants to fix it. She’s out on the streets marching.
But I think you can be a lioness even if you don’t do all those things. So, when we think of Ellie, Ellie wants to be pretty and loved and to marry a really nice guy and to have children and to enjoy the simple pleasures of life or what Homa would dub the bourgeois pleasures of life.
But that’s who she is. And I think she is also a lion woman because it takes an extraordinary amount of courage to live a very ordinary life, to be at home holding down the fort, to be the wife, to be the mother, as though that’s a simple job, which it’s not at all. And so yes, Ellie is also a lion woman.
Through my readers, I have learned that some believe Ellie’s mother to be a lion woman. And that surprised me because I didn’t. She started off being such an archetype of a narcissistic parent, but they showed me the parts of her that did require a tremendous amount of courage as well.
Elena: What would you like readers to take away from the book?
Ideally, I hope that this read is healing because Homa goes through a lot, Ellie goes through a lot., I don’t think it’s the fact that we don’t have losses in life because we all have losses in life. We all experience loss, but it’s the way you balance the losses in your life with the gains in your life that matters.
And I feel that Ellie and Homa heal and so I hope it’s healing to finish the book.
The other thing I hope readers take away is that freedom is fragile. Freedom is not guaranteed. There was a time which we see in the book when women thought they were good. They were done; they were guaranteed these rights. And then we see that the pendulum can swing, and those rights can be taken away. I cannot tell you the disbelief and the incredulous aspect of this. Before the revolution people were like, of course that wouldn’t happen here. Are you kidding me? That can’t happen here. Look at us. We are the most progressive, westernized country in this region. Those things can change. It is scary because you just don’t realize how quickly things can change.
And the last thing I hope they take away is really the lasting influence of friendship. You don’t need to stay in touch. You don’t need to continue the friendship for that friendship’s influence to matter and to shape you as a person.
Elena: Thank you so much, Marjan. I really enjoyed talking to you. I so appreciate your taking the time. Thank you.
Marjan: Thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for having me.
Elena: Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure.
August, 2025
