When I start reading a new book I am filled with so much excitement and curiosity. If I could I would read all day. Disappearing into another world. Becoming friends with the characters in it. And so full of aspiration my eyes absorb the first pages of ‘The Vapid Vanities of Wonder‘, written by Puriya Mirza.
In our interview the talented Minneapolis born and currently New York based artist tells us about jumping up and down in joy when holding his first novel in hands, why he finished writing it in Bangkok and about the modern youth who has their vanity but at the same time passionate, and angry, and ready to fight back.
“It’s a story about a diverse group of friends in New York City who go for a wild night out. Throughout the book, they start having conversations about issues so many young people talk about, like gender and identity, rent prices, the environment, and healthcare. It touches on grappling with your place in the world while growing up as the child of immigrants. These are all genuine conversations that so many of us are having. Honestly one of the dialogue scenes was something my friends and I were discussing in a group chat one night, and I thought, “wow so many people go through this, this is an enormous part of being young in 2019,” so I hopped out of bed at 3am and put pieces of that conversation straight into the book.”
Has being a writer always been a dream of yours? And how did you get into writing?
It’s funny, I actually dreamt of being a musician for about 10 years. I was never very good at making music, but I loved it and kept at it without really getting anywhere. Then my final semester of university, I took a creative writing course and I fell in love with writing. I looked forward to going to class every week (which was shocking, I never cared much for academia) and I loved working on the writing prompts we would be assigned. So I kept writing, and it was such a fulfilling way to express my creative voice. It was the first time in my life that I truly felt “I’m good at this, I can do this.” All my years of songwriting, I never understood why the lyrics I was writing weren’t ending up like the songs I wanted them to be. I felt frustrated creatively and unable to express what I was trying to say. Looking back on them, I realized the entire time I was writing song lyrics, I was actually attempting to write prose.
How do you feel when you hold your first published book „The Vapid Vanities of Wonder“ in your hands?
What a feeling! I jumped up and down around my little apartment in joy, then immediately facetimed my parents to show them. Then after a few minutes, I got back on my computer with the one thought, “there’s so much more work to do.” I knew that I’m a young author who nobody has heard of before, so I started planning different ways of how I would get my book out into the world. I drafted emails, I looked into marketing, I made lists of all the places I could send copies to. I have no publishing house behind me, no connections in this industry, and no experts to give me advice, so I knew I had to do it all on my own. I’d felt so many things while writing this novel, now what I really wanted to do was have the world read it and hopefully feel those same things, or at least their own version of them.
“All my years of songwriting, I never understood why the lyrics I was writing weren’t ending up like the songs I wanted them to be. I felt frustrated creatively and unable to express what I was trying to say. Looking back on them, I realized the entire time I was writing song lyrics, I was actually attempting to write prose.”
I would describe your first novel as a book about being young, friendship, love, observing the world and self- discovery. How would you describe it yourself in a few sentences?
Definitely all of those things, though it’s difficult for me to describe concisely because there are quite a few different themes threaded through it. It’s a story about a diverse group of friends in New York City who go for a wild night out. Throughout the book, they start having conversations about issues so many young people talk about, like gender and identity, rent prices, the environment, and healthcare. It touches on grappling with your place in the world while growing up as the child of immigrants. These are all genuine conversations that so many of us are having. Honestly one of the dialogue scenes was something my friends and I were discussing in a group chat one night, and I thought, “wow so many people go through this, this is an enormous part of being young in 2019,” so I hopped out of bed at 3am and put pieces of that conversation straight into the book. Essentially if I can boil it down to one point, it’s that we are the selfie generation, the Instagram generation, we like dressing up and taking photos of ourselves and going out with our friends… we’re young! That’s what the young do. We have our vanity and to a certain extent, there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t mean we can’t also be informed about what’s going on in the world, and passionate, and angry, and ready to fight back. These aren’t mutually exclusive, we can be both, the modern youth are unprecedentedly multidimensional, and I hope this book reflects that.
“…we are the selfie generation, the Instagram generation, we like dressing up and taking photos of ourselves and going out with our friends… we’re young! That’s what the young do. We have our vanity and to a certain extent, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
I truly love the intro sentence: „A true friendship is one of the immeasurable fortunes of this world. I am lucky to have enough several. This story is dedicated to you.“ What makes a real and true friendship in your eyes and do you remember one very important moment in your life where you realized the power of friendship?
I grew up as an only child, and I was one of the only Middle Eastern kids in my schools back in Minnesota, so I wasn’t very social and had trouble fitting wherever I went. However, throughout all these years, I had a small handful of very close friends and we did everything together. They were brothers to me in everything but blood, and they still are. A real and true friend is someone who’s in it for the long run, the ups and the downs. They’re someone who will tell you when you’re wrong, they’ll be honest with you and sometimes it’ll hurt, but it’s all out of love. As I entered my early 20’s, I didn’t think I’d make friends like that anymore, but several incredible people have proven me very wrong. I look at them all and I go, “I can’t wait to see you at my wedding. I can’t wait to be with you at yours.” They’re like family to me. I first moved from Minnesota to New York at 18, and my flight was at 7 in the morning. When I arrived at the airport, all these guys were there waiting for me, some still in their pajamas, sleepfresh in their eyes. They wanted to be with me until the very last moment, and right then I realized a thousand miles between us wouldn’t change that. 6 years later and it still hasn’t.
„So often the young are labeled lazy or inexperienced. Only concerned in matters of ease or image. Brimming with vapid vanities and too sensitive for the things old crumbling gatekeepers have over-simply labeled realities of the world.“ Is another quote out of your novel. What do you think are the most important issues for this current young generation?
Where to begin? Fighting climate change is such an urgent matter, because if the world doesn’t buckle down and take this immense threat seriously, the outcome will be devastating on a global scale. Then there’s also systematic equality, which is really just an umbrella that covers so many different things. The lives and the rights of people of color, women, LGBTQ, are being attacked on every level, from day to day life via one on one instances, all the way to the very top where government and the systems that our society is built on continue to push them down. Change needs to be made everywhere to ensure truly equal safety, opportunities, and rights to every human being. That will take a long time, but we need to start making those changes immediately.
“A real and true friend is someone who’s in it for the long run, the ups and the downs. They’re someone who will tell you when you’re wrong, they’ll be honest with you and sometimes it’ll hurt, but it’s all out of love.”
You finished writing the book in Bangkok. Was there a specific reason to do so? And how much do you think that surrounding has influenced you? Or to ask in another way, would the outcome been very much different if you would have finished it in New York?
I moved here so that I could have time and space to write. I was working full time in New York, with almost an hour commute each way, and I was having a pretty busy social life. I tried to cancel plans and stay in to write as much as I could, but there was still only so much free time. I came here so that I could write free of distraction, which has proved incredibly helpful. I’ve also just wanted to live in several foreign countries, so I figured now is the perfect time to do so. I don’t think Bangkok changed the outcome of the book, because I had a very clear idea of where I wanted it to go, but it gave me the time and freedom to be able to reach it much sooner than if I were to have stayed in New York.
At the beginning there is a passage where you write about the natural ebb and flow of a writer, how you write and delete etc. I think it takes a lot of stamina to finish a book. Was there a point where you though you couldn´t finish; like having an artistic blocking or doubts? And if so, how did you deal with that in that moment?
There was never a point where I thought I couldn’t finish it, I wanted to finish writing and have the book out in the world with every fiber of my being, but I had a few instances of writer’s block that sometimes lasted several days. I’d experiment with all sorts of solutions, reading and studying the text of some of my favorite authors, listening to music that moved me, going for walks around the city, Facetiming my friends whenever they woke up. Sometimes I’d just close my eyes and start typing full speed whatever first came to my mind, just to get some words out! It was mostly nonsense but a few great sentences actually came out that way.
“New York taught me drive and perseverance, the beauty in being alone, to always have an open mind and an open heart. It taught me to step out of my comfort zone.”
I found the part where you describe your upbringing and trying to fit in f.e by changing your name, really touching to read. Did you face a lot of difficult situation in your daily life or was it because you wanted to avoid them beforehand and therefore changed your name?
I was very fortunate to never face the severe side of things, more so things like the occasional name calling. Kids jokingly called me a terrorist a couple times which I wish 7th grade me had had the courage to stand up to. The things that always stood out to me were the smaller details all my friends would do with their families that never existed in my life, like how they would have large family gatherings over holidays (it was just my mom, dad, and I in Minnesota so holidays were always quiet), or the music/comic book/film references they would get from their parents (I knew nothing about Batman or the Beatles or Elton John for instance, which my friends’ parents passed on down to them) and some of the things they ate really baffled me, like meatloaf! And in turn, the Iranian foods we would have at home would be strange to some visitors and I always felt embarrassed eating it in public or at school.
I have a few Iranian friends, and when I started reading your book I found it to be written in a very poetic language, which is also something I always note with my friends. What would you say has shaped you most from the Iranian culture of your parents?
Thank you so much! That language specifically is in part because Sylvia Plath and Scott Fitzgerald were the first writers who ever really captivated me, and poetic imagery is something I’ve really held onto. From Iranian culture, it is by far the hospitality that I’ve taken away. If you go to an Iranian household, they’ll immediately offer you tea, then bring you plate after plate of fruits and dates and nuts and seeds, it can be overwhelming. I love offering people tea or coffee when they come over, or fruit, snacks, you name it. I love hosting people. Even when a friend comes to stay with me in New York or in Bangkok for a week, I insist they take my bed so they’re more comfortable and I sleep on the couch. I’m usually told it’s weird haha, but it makes me happy to make sure my friends are comfortable when they come.
“From Iranian culture, it is by far the hospitality that I’ve taken away. If you go to an Iranian household, they’ll immediately offer you tea, then bring you plate after plate of fruits and dates and nuts and seeds, it can be overwhelming.”
You told us that: „I’m aiming to start a new era of what authors can do.“ What did you mean by that exactly?
Through the internet, we’ve seen more and more collaboration with artists across different mediums, and we’ve seen different artists operating in the same spheres. You’ll see rappers working with visual artists and new media, actors working with fashion designers, photographers really working with everyone – you also see them all in the same social circles, talked about in the same magazines, in the same breath, but there’s never a novelist in there with all of them. I grew up surrounded by friends who were musicians and photographers, I worked a year in the fashion industry in New York, these are the worlds that I know and that I love, and as I start my career as a writer, I want to be an author who exists alongside these artists because that’s the most honest version of who I am. I want to be an author in fashion campaigns, I want to be in my friends music videos or help them with their short films, I want to continue taking photos as a way of documenting these years, and I want to work with designers to put my words on clothes (I do this for my own clothes but it doesn’t always look so great.) I’m not just a writer, every facet of me is an artist in some way or another, and I want my career to reflect that.
Your favourite writers and the last book that impressed you?
I’m actually still pretty new to the literary world, my fascination began only a few years ago and so I have a lot of catching up to do, but the favorites are: Jack Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, Colette, Scott Fitzgerald, and Hunter S. Thompson, and I’ve only read one book of hers – but I’m absolutely in love with Bluets by Maggie Nelson. I’m currently reading The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. I hadn’t heard of him or the book until I was halfway done with my own, but the word “vanities” is pretty eye catching and I heard this was also about New York social life. Being that my book is called “The Vapid Vanities of Wonder” and revolves around young people socializing in New York, I picked it up to make sure there wasn’t much actual overlap in stories (thankfully there wasn’t at all) and at the moment, 600 pages later, I’m absolutely blown away. I’m looking forward to reading more of his work and adding him to that list as well.
“I’m not just a writer, every facet of me is an artist in some way or another, and I want my career to reflect that.”
What do you miss about Minneapolis and what means home to you?
I miss the people there every single day. I have some incredible friends in Minneapolis who I wish I had more time to be with, and my mom and dad are still there. I’ve wrestled with the idea of “home” for a while, and I’ve settled on the conclusion that home to me is when I’m with people I love. When I’m with my best friends, I look at them and think I’m home. When I see my parents, I look at them and think I’m home. These people are split between three different cities: New York, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, so it’s safe to say I’m always a little homesick no matter where I am. I also think home is a place where the ethos, pacing, and mentality resonate with your own. I have a lot of love for Minneapolis and it’s truly an amazing place, but I honestly don’t feel like I fit on. Then with New York, I felt “at home” my very first day there, it was like I had been waiting my entire life for it without even realizing.
What has New York taught you?
New York has taught me how beautifully so many people of different kinds can live together side by side. It’s taught me to love how different I am, and to embrace all of those qualities that make me unique. It’s taught me drive and perseverance, the beauty in being alone, to always have an open mind and an open heart. It taught me to step out of my comfort zone. So much of the person that I am today, I learned from or in New York, and I’ll always be grateful for the ways it shaped me.
Extract from the The Vapid Vanities of Wonder‘:
“She went on to talk about how she used to be just like us, going out with her friends when she was younger, how now she works at a women’s shelter near the neighborhood now and loves being able to help, serving meals and doing creative types of therapy through painting pretty tree lined corners of the city. How she wanted to hold some of those hurt hearts in her hands and soothe them like a soft creek over pebbles landed far from their homes and right there I found out she was an angel of the world. “Come out with us tonight!” Flynn beckoned with his heart full and true, right leg bouncing in excitement. “Aww sweetie I’ve got to go to work at the shelter right now, they need me tonight and I love to help out. My girls and I did it plen-ty when we was your age! Dressin’ up and doing our hair, going around bouncin’ from place to place. Ha ha oh—half of the fun was just gettin’ ready.” “You must be a World Angel,” I leaned forward. “Aw no no I’m just tryna do some good, love. So many people need it. You kids have so much fun tonight.” And just then The Angel got off at Myrtle before turning around back towards us, “Mmmm goodbye Pretty, Pretty, and Pret-ty! You three boys go have a cra-a-a-azy night,” in the most lovely staccato and the warm halogen carried her softly away. Vanity satisfied—admittedly unimportantly, but self-image is woven into some generational anxiety and any little moment can feed it and anyways, she was sweet and spoke with her heart which is what really matters. My friends and I waved her off and wished her the best knowing full well she already had it all within herself.”
