Her Story, My Voice: Honoring My Mother’s Journey in Imperfect

by Katy Motiey

I have been journal writing ever since I was ten years old, when we left Iran during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. I have a full box of journals buried in the closet. I have often wondered why I write down my thoughts the way I do. I write them down in no particular order, as they come to me and, I feel a sense of relief after I write.  Maybe my writing process is a result of the Iranian tribal culture which dictates, “don’t tell anyone, nobody needs to know.” And yet, my journal writing led to the recent publication of my recent true life novel, “Imperfect” where I tell the fictional story of what happened to my mother in 1970’s Iran.

When I was three years old and we were living in the US, my father’s brain cancer resurfaced. We went to Iran on a trip, and shortly after he passed away. With no family support in the US, my mother, brother and I were forced to make Tehran home.  

On the night my father was buried in December of 1971, my mother was served with custody papers by my father’s side of the family. Given the patriarchal laws in Iran, and since women have no rights to their children, they could do that. From that time until 1979, my mother not only fought a custody battle and a lawsuit to keep my brother and I, she also got a job as the Chief Librarian of the American Embassy Library in Tehran in order to generate income and to take care of us.

I had heard bits and pieces of my mother’s story, and the injustices she suffered, while I was growing up. But in true Iranian fashion, I had never heard the entire story and not from her. Maybe it was too painful for my mother to share her story with me, or maybe she kept it buried so she could stay in the moment and propel herself forward with all of life’s challenges, raising two children a as a single mother, first in Iran and then in the US.

All that said, when I was in college, I finally overheard her tell the story to a friend of mine, over dinner. I was shocked, sad, disappointed, and disgusted all at once. Is it possible to experience such an intense wave of varied emotions? My mother’s story weighed on me for years and years. Although, I never wrote about it in my journal, I thought about the injustices she suffered often.  

I went on for years, throughout college and law school, writing in journals. When a friend said something I didn’t like I wrote it down, when I didn’t get into a college I thought I should get into I wrote about it, after a failed relationship, I took pen to paper, when someone mentioned the word “cancer” I choked up and then wrote about my father’s death. Writing became a part of my thought process, it gave me calm and helped me unwind waves of emotion. Although I never wrote about my mother, somewhere buried in my subconscious I must have felt the need to do that.

In 2001, I decided to take a writing class to explore writing with a trained author. By the end of the class, I wrote a short story about the day my mother and I left Iran in December of 1978. I was encouraged to write a book and to use the story as the opening chapter.

In October of 2009, when the economy was turning and I had some down time from work, I decided to write a book. I picked up the phone and had a long conversation with my mother about what had happened to her in 1970s Iran. That conversation continued over the course of several months. At first, I documented all the events I knew about, my father dying, my mother being served, our time in Iran. When I couldn’t remember details, I would call her, and she would fill in the gaps. Some of our conversations felt like therapy sessions, for both of us. I played around with tense and started various drafts. Ultimately, I decided since I was not there for much of what had happened to my mother, the story would have to be told in the third person.  

My mother comes from a fairly large family, with siblings, step siblings and loads of cousins. Most were there for her during her difficult times. She also found support from a large community of “foreign wives” as I call them, the American mothers of kids in my international elementary school. Because there were too many people to include in the story, in many instances I collapsed characters into one. Finally, because I was writing such a personal story changing the names of family members helped me depersonalize what I was doing and to better describe the painful truth of what happened.

I worked on the manuscript on and off for 14 years, until one year ago I connected with a hybrid publisher who helped me give birth to the story. I had always envisioned publication on Mother’s Day and in May of 2024, on Mother’s Day, the book became available.  

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Katy is an attorney, the Chief Legal, Administrative and Sustainability Officer at a US publicly traded company. She graduated from Georgetown University, undergraduate and law school. Although she was born in Iran, she immigrated to the US from Iran at age ten with her mother and brother during the Iranian Revolution. Katy has been devoted to her work having been General Counsel for seven CEOs and worked for multiple multinational corporations, including three publicly traded companies. Though dedicated to her career, Katy enjoys spending time with family, including her remarkable mother, the subject of her first novel. In 2018, she reconnected and now lives with her loving significant other, Robert, a childhood classmate from Iran, and their adorable dog Molly (aka “Killer”). During her free time, she enjoys playing tennis, skiing, working out, and spending time with amazing friends and neighbors.

Find out more about Katy on her website: https://www.katymotiey.com/

IMPERFECT

Imperfect is the story of one woman’s loss, courage, love, and perseverance before and during the Iranian Revolution. Based on the experiences of the author’s mother, Vida Shamsa’s life takes an unexpected and dramatic turn with the sudden death of her young husband in 1971.

Struggling against the patriarchal customs of Iran, she is faced with fighting her husband’s family for control of her children and her life. Never giving up fighting for her son and daughter, she challenges Iran’s legal and personal injustices against the backdrop of political unrest during the Shah’s regime, the rise of Khomeini, and the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. Imperfect engages the reader in a quest for equality for a single mother who rages against outdated traditions and her need to control her life in order to protect her children, whom she loves above all else.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing