The Story Behind The Writing of The Blue Dress

By Rebecca Morrison

After losing my legal contracting job at the beginning of the pandemic, I decided after decades of dreaming about it, I was going to go after this thing that I thought was as doable as being an astronaut, becoming a writer.

I signed up for an online writing class with a teacher who ended up being a huge influence in my writing life, Peter Mountford. I didn’t know that much about creative nonfiction, but as soon as I started the class, it felt like a perfect fit. A way for me to tell my stories with the kind of vulnerability that felt natural to me.

Each week, I turned in essays about growing up as an Iranian immigrant, and my mother who believed thinness was the highest form of beauty. The more I wrote, the more I got encouragement from Peter and the other students in the class, some of whom I’m still friends with. I saw that if I could get close enough to the truth, maybe I could tell my story in a way that made sense of the pain I felt, and the struggles my mom and I had gone through for decades.

I let my family know I was planning to tell my and their stories. This was especially difficult for my mother because a big part of what I wanted to write about was our difficult past.

We had spent years working to repair our relationship and learning to love each other without judgment. Her support let me dive into this new life of writing. Whether it was right or not, I wanted and needed her love and backing. With it, I was able to write.

Fifty pages in, I attended an event in New York for a publishing panel hosted by Susan Shapiro. I found out about the panel because I was taking one of her super helpful pitching classes. After the panel, I met Pronoy Sarkar, who was a senior editor at Little, Brown, at the time. I told him about the memoir I was writing and the essays I was publishing.

He gave me advice that changed the way I looked at the publishing process. He encouraged me to keep writing essays in order to find my voice, figure out which stories resonated most with readers, and show me whether I truly wanted to spend the next two, five, ten years of my life immersed in the writing and publishing of this book.

At that same event, I met Joy Peskin, a children’s book editor who read my essays, and encouraged me to write a middle-grade novel based on my childhood. I’d never considered fiction or writing for young people. But something about her suggestion felt right, or at least intriguing enough to explore. So I did something I never expected, I set aside the memoir and spent the next year turning my childhood memories into a novel. The core of the story is about the mother-daughter relationship, most of which is based on my life. I used the same emotions of my memoir, mother-daughter tension, developing an eating disorder, struggle for belonging, but I moved pieces around, rearranged events, gave characters different dimensions.

As I was writing the novel, I kept publishing essays. During one of Allison K. Williams’s helpful Craft Talks classes, she said something that gave me permission to write my pieces with more purpose. She talked about staying with our “beats,” or areas of focus, and how it’s not only okay but can be smart to stick to the same themes, instead of chasing new ideas. I found that when I did this, I could develop more expertise and authority in the issues I cared about — body image, mental health issues, and the struggles of belonging and identity both as an immigrant and a woman.

A short time later, I published an essay on the TODAY Show website about my mother and my complicated relationship, and how we went from a difficult time during my adolescence to finding healing later in our lives. The piece went viral. That’s when a great agent from Folio contacted me about the memoir I had mentioned I was writing in my bio. I told her I was conflicted because even though I wanted to write a memoir, I’d switched my focus to writing a children’s novel. She introduced me to a fantastic children’s book agent at Folio. I signed with both of them, one for adult books and the other for kids books.

Writing the novel felt right. The more I worked on it, the more I saw it was the perfect place for me. I could tell the emotional truth of my childhood but have the freedom to change details, compress timelines, and invent characters. I could give readers a story that made them feel seen without exposing my family to judgement.

After finishing the novel, my agent sent it as an exclusive submission to the same amazing woman, Joy Peskin, who saw my story the year prior, and encouraged me to tell it as a novel for young people. By some beautiful miracle, she said yes, and I sold it to Macmillan’s imprint Farrar, Straus Giroux. It’ll be published on March 24, 2026.

This book that’s my heart and soul exists because I pushed through the self-doubt and imposter syndrome that permeated every cell of my body, and wrote it anyway so I can do what I love most, telling stories that could make others, especially young girls, feel connected, understood and seen.
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Rebecca Morrison‘s work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, among others. Her debut novel, The Blue Dress, based on her childhood as an Iranian immigrant trying to fit into her family’s expectations of beauty and her American homeland comes out March 24, 2026 with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. You can find her at rebeccakmorrison.com.

THE BLUE DRESS

For fans of Jasmine Warga and Starfish, an Iranian American girl navigates complicated relationships with her mother, her best friend, and her body image in this unflinching and ultimately uplifting middle-grade debut.

Sometimes Yasmin feels like her body isn’t hers. And it’s not just because puberty has mounted a full-on alien invasion, or that emigrating from Iran a year-and-a-half ago has meant one change after another. It’s also because her mother constantly pushes her to lose weight, like sewing Yasmin a beautiful blue dress for Persian New Year that is too tight on purpose.

At school, it doesn’t help that Yasmin’s best friend, Carmen, is petite and close to her own mother, or that popular-girl Zoe always has a mean comment to spare. Yasmin is sure her crush, Jack, won’t ever like her the way she is, either.

With the pressure to fit in closing in on all sides, Yasmin starts taking desperate measures. But if being thin is supposed to make her happier, then why does losing weight feel like losing parts of herself, too?

From debut author Rebecca Morrison comes The Blue Dress, a heart-rending, funny, and hopeful book inspired by her own life, relatable to anyone who has ever needed to break away from someone else’s vision of how they should look in order to embrace their true self.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing