February, 2003
Roya Hakakian was working as a producer for CBS News in 1999 when an editorialist from the New York Times began e-mailing her. He had been assigned the task of writing about the Iranian student demonstrations and, in an unusual confession for a Times reporter, admitted to knowing nothing about their significance. Hakakian, he was told, was Iranian, in news, and could help. For Hakakian, Iran was like another life, someplace she had left at the age of 18 amid great national strife, a place that did not figure much in her current life as an up-and-coming newswoman for 60 Minutes, ABC News, and CBS. But something about the cyber-Q&A intrigued her, and she answered the man as objectively as she could, believing it would be a casual couple of questions. Not only did the correspondence last for months, but after the editorial was published, the Times staffer did not stop e-mailing her. In fact, the questions increased. “I said 'Dude',” Hakakian recalls, “the editorial was published.” At which point the journalist printed out their long communiqués, brought them to her in a stack, and replied, “Look, there's a book here.”

“I'm not a religious person,” Hakakian says in retrospect, “but I do believe that somehow we are guided through life, and this was one of those times.” Plus, she says, for a Times writer to give up the story to her…she had to write the book.

She hasn't stopped writing since, and her memoir - of her Iranian childhood, living through the 1979 and 1999 revolutions, and coming to terms as an adult with the country's role in her life and the world's current situation - will be published by Crown in January 2004. Its working title is Journey Out of the Land of No. On February 6, 2003, she will read a portion of it for February's MacDowell Downtown. She will also take questions.

Hakakian, who is 36, explains that for her, the expatriate life was never typical. “I had not looked at these questions [the reporter asked] for 15 years, and it became very difficult for me to connect that piece of my life with this one. This book is really my way of coming out of the closet, of bridging two lives.” It could also be a way for her American readers to begin to understand the Mideast through the eyes of someone whose sensibility is one part steely journalist, one part curious artist seeking to find the commonality among us.

“I thought I was writing about something I knew so well,” she says. “But I'm discovering things I never knew.” As an example, she cites the similarity between the 1979 revolution with the United States' in 1776. “Iran had been a monarchy for 2,500 years. The '79 revolution was for that medley of things we call the First Amendment: freedom of speech, lifting of censorship, freedom in printed material.”

There have been other discoveries as well, namely how the political arc of her homeland mirrors her own personal development. “I thought 1979 was this moment of perfect innocence and pure collective jubilance for a whole nation. But it wasn't as pure as I thought.” There were unseen powers, agendas, and elements of corruption that marred the state's reformation. “Life became miserable for everyone. That revolution lifted my generation - young, secular idealistic Jews - bolstered us with the hope of a free and democratic society, just before it drowned us all in its unforeseen and powerful fundamentalist undercurrent.” Five years later, with the Shah overthrown and the Ayatollah Khomeini and Islamic Republic of Iran firmly in power, her family fled. The moment that had started so purely and ended with such disillusionment became a good metaphor for her own coming-of-age.

Since, Hakakian's “other life” as an American has been highly successful. She has established herself as a well-known journalist, film producer, and poet. She was nominated for a Peabody Award for her work on 60 Minutes; she has directed a documentary about child armies that actor Robert DeNiro narrated. A book of her Persian poems, For the Sake of Water, was published by Tasveer Publishers in 1993.

The fact that it was Iran's 1999 revolution that would bookend her young adulthood and allow her to come full circle does not seem so peculiar now. Where the 1979 revolution exiled her from her homeland, the 1999 rebellion and the journalist's questions brought her back. And this time, still idealistic but longing to see the bigger picture, Hakakian is looking for answers about the human struggle through her own. “What I thought was so unique about Iran happens in many other parts of the world. People can become a unifying force that cannot be denied. [This book] is my way of paying tribute to that. I think if you survive something, you have a responsibility to share it.”