Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror

by Afarin Majidi

Earning an MFA in writing at the New School, working at Rolling Stone magazine, and being courted by an editor at a prestigious publishing house—Afarin Majidi should be thrilled with the direction her life is taking as she turns thirty. Instead, she is spiraling into the depths of madness as she seeks love and acceptance in an Islamophobic society.

After colleagues at the magazine drug and rape her, she’s left with an unfinished novel. She turns to a former professor, James Lasdun, with whom she develops a toxic obsession. Majidi is the woman he calls “Nasreen” in his memoir, Give Me Everything You Have.

Raw and honest, Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror is a haunting meditation on identity, misogyny, violence, and mental illness.

Majidi earned her BA from Barnard College and an MFA from New School University. She is the niece of Abdol-Madgid Madgidi, a prominent cabinet member during the Shah of Iran’s reign. Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror begins with her family’s narrow escape from execution during the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Genres: Feminism, Memoir

278 pages, Paperback

First published December 7, 2017

About the author

Afarin Majidi is an Iranian-American writer. She holds a BA in English Literature from Barnard College and an MFA in Fiction Writing from New School University. Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror is her debut memoir. Her novel-in-progress, Ziba, is set in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.

Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror book jacket copy

Earning an MFA in writing at the New School, working at Rolling Stone magazine, and being courted by an editor at a prestigious publishing house—Afarin Majidi should be thrilled with the direction her life is taking as she turns thirty. Instead, she is spiraling into the depths of madness as she seeks love and acceptance in an Islamophobic society.

After colleagues at the magazine drug and rape her, she’s left with an unfinished novel. She turns to a former professor, James Lasdun, with whom she develops a toxic obsession. Majidi is the woman he calls “Nasreen” in his memoir, Give Me Everything You Have.

Raw and honest, Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror is a haunting meditation on identity, misogyny, violence, and mental illness.

Majidi earned her BA from Barnard College and an MFA from New School University. She is the niece of Abdol-Madgid Madgidi, a prominent cabinet member during the Shah of Iran’s reign. Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror begins with her family’s narrow escape from execution during the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

The book is available on Barnes & Noble and Amazon (paperback, ebook, Kindle)

Reviews

[Miranda Reads]

At forty-five years old, I'm shocked to find myself still here.

Writing reviews for memoirs, especially ones that get sent to me, is horribly difficult. The story and the author are incredibly intertwined and critique of one creates an association with the other. I will try to keep that separate.

I was an Iranian Muslim, who'd been raped by a Christian and had hoped to be saved by the Jew

Our narrator has gone through far more than most would ever experience, from childhood abuse to statutory rape to raped by her coworker all the while suffering from a deep-seated and untreated mental illness.

Reading that was difficult. And living through it, infinitely moreso.

I struggled with reading this, in part because this isn't subject I willing read. Though I asked after the content before I agreed to read and review, I wasn't aware of the extent that the novel relies on explicit (often sexually explicit) traumatizing events to move along the plot.

And in part because the style of writing often went without clear connections between the real world and her drug-induced hazes. In addition, it was very stream-of-consciousness when she entered a manic phase of her bipolar disorder. This made it difficult for me to become submerged into the story.

At times this read like a litany of sins - like when she admitted to hiring men and then sleeping with them. I can only imagine the fallout if the gender roles were reversed - a man hiring multiple women and then using his advantage as a boss to sleep with them.

Others times this felt like an empowering #metoo novel - she has survived. And I could not imagine a more difficult life to have led. When she talked about her own troubles and strife - moments like that, I really connected with her.

And still other times, this almost felt like a vindictive tell-all with pointed, personal attacks on people who've wronged the narrator - such as when a woman decided to stop helping the narrator with her novel. The narrator then barrages the poor woman with emails and calls her out explicitly within the book - no name change.

Moments like that made it difficult to connect with the main character. Much her actions in the book consisted of self-sabotage, actually sabotage, harassment and the burning of so, so many people that (at times) it was difficult to form that essential emotional connection to her.

She mentions in the beginning that she only changed the names of three people (her sisters). Therefore leaving us to assume that many of the events, including those involving her family, used their real names.

And while I can see how their lives and actions influenced her formative years (often contributing to negatively to our narrator's life), I still felt that some of the tell-all elements went too far.

I can only say this based on my own (admittingly sheltered) personality/experiences, but I could not imagine horrible, personal events being published so bluntly in my sibling's memoir.

The more I read, the more I wondered...what if her sister didn't want the world to know that she was forced to give a blow job at gun point? Or if her other sister didn't want her bipolar/teenage drug addictions to be published? Or if another sister didn't want everyone to read about a failed suicide attempt?

And yes, while she changed 3 names, she has 5 sisters, a brother, mother, father, aunts and a famous uncle. I have a feeling people can piece together who is who. That just didn't sit right for me.

I commend the narrator on her unwavering honesty but I feel like I am too casual of a reader to truly appreciate this novel. This book just became too much for me.

I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

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[Diane Wallace]

DNF...shelving it for now..

**'A writer is always going to betray somebody(re:readers). If you're going to be honest with your subject/topic,you cannot be genteel.'

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

(2.5) The author, knowing I’m a big fan of James Lasdun’s memoir Give Me Everything You Have, offered me a copy of her own recent memoir, which is a sort of rebuttal of Lasdun’s account of being stalked*, via a Goodreads message. (Note: she also goes by the aliases “Juliet Tran” and “Lucy” on this site, perhaps among others.) I was happy to take a look so that I could compare the two books and feel like I’d heard both sides of the story.

Ironically, although I read this chiefly for the Lasdun connection, I most enjoyed the early chapters before he first makes a proper appearance. The short prologue is an excellent route into the story. Set in 2012, it depicts Majidi as being aware of her own irrational behavior and regretful about her extreme actions towards Lasdun. It’s just six months since the death of her half-sister Nasrin (she’s referred to by the alias “Nasreen” in Lasdun’s memoir), and the author is taking recreational drugs and in a shaky mental state. “She’s very sick. She needs help,” a cop who visits her apartment concludes.

From here we jump back to 1979, a time of unrest in Iran. The author’s uncle, Madgid, was a cabinet member for the Shah but was later arrested. Each day Majidi went to the airport with her non-practicing Muslim family to try to escape. They finally got the last plane out to America, where an aunt had arranged visas and a rental home in New Jersey. Majidi had three sisters (the only characters given aliases here) and a violent, traditional brother. Her parents had little to no English, and her mother – Maman Shirin, the best character in the book – drank. Collectively, her sisters had a lot of issues, including eating disorders, delinquency and a restraining order. A troubled home life manifested itself in Majidi’s panic attacks, drug use and promiscuity. Ultimately she got a scholarship to Barnard and worked for various New York City publishers and magazines while writing a novel about the Islamic Revolution.

James Lasdun was Majidi’s advisor during her creative writing degree at The New School starting in 2003. Her chief grievances are that he didn’t help her as much as he could have (though he had no obligation to help with her novel two years after the course), and that he led her on professionally and sexually. It feels like she had unrealistic expectations all along as to what he could do for her, and she tended to take the smallest things personally, like him not being able to open her e-mail attachment or asking her how her Thanksgiving was in front of the whole class.

Sometimes the author can get outside her own head enough to recognize how delusional she was being (“I was growing more delirious each day”), but other times she comes up with a bizarre story and sticks to it, such as that Lasdun and the editor he later put her in touch with tried to steal the plot of her novel and that he continually used her for material. While it’s distressing that she feels her accusation that she was drugged and raped by Rolling Stone colleagues wasn’t taken seriously (and believes tacit racism is involved in how she’s treated), it does sound like there was insufficient evidence.

For a self-published book, this is reasonably well written. It doesn’t have the frequent typos and grammar problems I’ve come to expect from my work reviewing self-published material, and the prose flows easily. However, most sentences start with a pronoun or “When.” There is also simply too much detail. The stream of short-term jobs and abusive boyfriends feels endless. The flavor of all these years could have been given without a blow-by-blow, perhaps by combining some characters and situations. It is also difficult to sympathize with the author because of her persistent bitterness and frequently unreasonable decisions. There is such a strong victim mentality at work here, starting in Chapter 5 and continuing all the way through to the end, e.g., “I was so conflicted about why I was being treated so poorly by so many people that I dwelled on it all the time” (p. 138).

It seems that after brief periods of remorse in 2012 and 2014 (she sent him an apology after reading a review of his memoir that quoted one of her particularly vicious accusations; “Apparently, James Lasdun doesn’t accept rape, poverty, and mental illness as reasons for inconveniencing him because he never responded” (p. 321)), she lapsed back into resentment. By 2017, when the epilogue is set, she’s as bitter as ever (“I’m still haunted by James’s dishonest memoir and the misogynist female reviewers quick to praise him” (presumably that’s directed at me!) & “I can’t read a word of James’s memoir in which he wrongly calls me a stalker.” (p. 322)), and still spouting conspiracy theories: “white feminism has failed women of color” (p. 323); “If Trump remains president, my chances of being sent to a Muslim internment camp are high” (p. 325) – which, currently, doesn’t seem all that unlikely after all. The sudden ending returns to the picture of her as dangerously mentally unstable.

What doesn’t help is that soon after finishing this book I moved on to Porochista Khakpour’s Sick, a memoir by a fellow Iranian-American novelist who has also struggled with mental illness and sexual abuse but writes much more eloquently about her experiences. The thing I perhaps find most confusing is that Writing and Madness is being presented as a “response to” a book Majidi hasn’t actually read, so she has prepared no defense against the most damning pieces of evidence Lasdun includes, particularly the anti-Semitic material (see below for examples). She does own up to being a “verbal terrorist,” but doesn’t, I think, fully admit to the venomous nature of her harassment campaign against Lasdun – not just the barrage of hostile e-mails, but forwards and cc’s to smear his reputation, reviews and comments on his work across the Web, and impersonating him and others online.

I’ve gone on for far too long about a book whose quality doesn’t fully merit such an in-depth consideration. It brings up some interesting issues, yes, and I was keen to see how the author would portray her relationship with James Lasdun, but it’s not a book I can widely recommend on its own strength. Nonetheless, I thank the author for sending a copy for review.


*After I finished this I went back and reread Lasdun’s memoir. He has pleasant early memories of “Nasreen” and her work; he was genuinely impressed by her writing ability and was happy to recommend her novel-in-progress to agents when she got in touch again two years after he taught her. By quoting directly from Majidi’s hundreds of vitriolic, anti-Semitic e-mails (the latter is an aspect she tries to downplay**), he gives the better sense of just how unstable she was and how desperately she pinned her hopes on him. He is humble enough to ask himself whether any of Majidi’s claims could have some truth to them – perhaps he did, unconsciously, base a character from one of his stories on her; he was slow to realize the flirtation in her e-mails and then went along with it more than he should have as a happily married man; and mental illness (bipolar) and/or drug use might go some way towards explaining her behavior, even if it doesn’t fully exonerate her.

**“I wasn’t fully brainwashed into being a Nazi just yet. Deep down, a part of me was still in love with him, and I even convinced myself that I had not been hateful in my piles of anti-Semitic emails.” (p. 304); “I tortured him while claiming to be his victim and telling him how easy it would be to legally screw me, the Iranian, because of his permanent victim status as a Jew. I hated him for having power in weakness, but I hated myself more for having none at all.” (p. 314); & phrases like “Jewish conspiracy” and “just like a Jew.”

[Ann Bogle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got wrapped up in reading Afarin Majidi's _Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror_ and felt I was inside an anatomy of how things take place. There is no shortage of heartache and loss and panic in the story told in linear form from near the beginning to near the end. That the timeline is straight counterbalances the confusion, even madness, of the events of the tale. The book does an admirable job of indicating crazy thinking as a sign of unraveling trauma. It is good that the author eventually gets care for the condition that results from harms in her life, including a rape that at first seems too mysterious for her to believe and that becomes a pinnacle event once it is mostly understood. The writing about that rape alone is a feat in writing. There is a fixation on a teacher that becomes the subject of a different memoir, one that James Lasdun wrote about Majidi after assigning her a different name, a first name. It would be interesting to read his book and reflect on how it intersects with hers. It seems his readers would be in for an enlightening experience to read Majidi's book as well. One wants there to be a solution to a dispiriting lack of reciprocal love in her memoir. There is family love but also family hardship to bear. The memoir tackles many subjects including school, work, housing, loss of one's first country (Iran), war, and misogyny that is influenced by origins and religion, that the author identifies as racism. I have recommended the memoir to several readers as a guide in understanding and describing maltreatment and life. I read this quotation by James Baldwin today, and it reminds me of Majidi's achievement: "The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat." On the other hand, if you veer toward this able style in storytelling and memory, you will not feel threatened but awake.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir contains very serious subject matter told in a unique, straightforward voice. It is full of tearfully poignant, intimate accounts of physical and emotional abuse all the way from early childhood, in family, friendships, and romantic and professional relationships. The narrative is framed within the revealing context of Iran's political turmoil from the 70s to present, and affected many areas of the author's life, across the globe to her new life in America, passing along to generations, within families and within communities. The narrative is paced evenly and the flashback structure is effective in relaying some insight into the tragic events. The scenes of cruelty and abuse can be very rough to read through, but many readers can appreciate the insights and many universal themes, such as racism and identity, reminiscent of books like Ellison's "Invisible Man".

[Eve Stein · Rating 5 out of 5]

A deeply compelling read of one woman's story or survival in a world where the odds are against her. Eloquently written and bravely delves into complex issues that are too often tiptoed around such as mental illness, misogyny, Rape, Identity politics, War, Trauma and Islamophobia. A riveting read that I devoured and that changed and challenged me. Could seem a heartbreaking litany of misfortunes were it not for the metamorphic alchemy of her artistry.

[Stephen M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dirty Laundry: A One-Sided Literary Feud

Afarin Majidi’s memoir Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror is a primary source in the the history of hurt. It is also a remarkable document and a testament to overcoming.
In 1979, upper middle-class Iranian women like Afarin Majidi wore French fashions and perfume, smoked in public and generally enjoyed the same social freedoms as western women. Iran was then a kingdom, ruled by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – the Shah of Iran.
The kingdom to which the Shah was heir was 2,500 years old. It began with the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC) which stretched from Anatolia and Egypt across western Asia to northern India and Central Asia. It was then the largest and most powerful empire the world had ever seen. Two-and-a-half millennia later, in 1967, the Shah proclaimed himself ‘King of Kings’ (his other titles included ‘Light of the Aryans’). Vanity aside, Mohammad Reza Shah had some reason to boast – he was responsible for modernizing his country’s industry and military and for instituting economic and social reforms. He achieved this by championing liberal Western ideals and values. But he was widely viewed as a puppet of America and the CIA and as a vain despot who lined his own pockets while putting American interests first. His feared secret police – SAVAK – brutally repressed domestic dissent.
Afarin’s uncle was Minister of Development under the Shah; her father was a civil servant in his government. Her father was not political, but her uncle was third in command, just below Prime Minister Hoveida. In 1978, the embattled Shah threw Uncle Magdid in prison in an unsuccessful bid to appease the revolutionaries intent on deposing him. Uncle Magdid escaped from prison; the Shah left Tehran in January 1979, never to return. The 2,500-year-old Persian monarchy which the Shah was bent on refashioning as ‘The Great Civilization’ had come to an end.
In February 1979, Afarin, her brother, three sisters and her parents escaped with just the clothes on their backs. They left Tehran as upper middle-class Iranians and landed in Newark as immigrants – foreigners – their economic status much-reduced.
*
In 1980 her cousin Ali Reza, who had just begun his studies at Boston College, was stabbed to death in the street. Before killing him, his murderer called him a ‘hostage taker’ (a reference to the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis). The killer could have had no way of knowing that Ali Reza loathed the Ayatollah and all he stood for. ‘Ali Reza’s murder made us all feel unsafe,’ Afarin writes. For many Americans, all Iranians are the same. It was like that then, and it’s especially like that now and has been since 9/11.
Afarin explains that her mother began drinking heavily and she developed insomnia, holding her breath at night, trying to empty her mind to imagine what it feels like to be dead. She had nightmares about her father digging in their new back yard, ‘burying gold and piles of faceless dead people’.
From the start of her memoir, we are aware of the profound (and quite literal) sense of alienation experienced by Afarin. She fell into one abusive relationship after another with American men. One of the remarkable qualities about this memoir is that she does not gloss over this. She describes a string of abusive relationships, and the reader can feel the sheer weight of them and the misery she endured.
In autumn 2003 she begins to attend a writing workshop taught by the British author James Lasdun. She is 31, he is 45. She is attracted to him and she to him. Two years later, while working at Rolling Stone magazine, she writes, she was drugged and raped by colleagues. She delays reporting it to the police (she was worried she might be fired from keep her job.)
Afarin is back in touch with Lasdun six months after the assault. He offers to assist with her novel about the Iranian revolution, introducing her to his agent and an editor, the famous Joyce Johnson. This does not go well
Soon, Afarin goes off the deep end. She moves from Brooklyn to Orange County, CA. To say things go pear-shaped after this is an understatement. She falls into a deep depression, interspersed with bouts of mania. She thinks she is pursued by secret police. She smells poison gas everywhere and attempts to make everyone she meets aware of it (“I pounded on all the front doors, yelling for everyone to get out’ is a regular occurrence.”) She stops washing (“I refused to shower, believing the water was laced with the same poisonous gas I was already breathing.”). The fantastic and the real are delivered in the same tbreaths. She is evicted from one apartment after another.
After the police are called to intercede during a visit with her parents that goes badly wrong, Afarin’s sister brings her to a hospital emergency room where she is sedated then sent to a psychiatric facility. She is hospitalized for two weeks and diagnosed as bipolar. After a simple adjustment of medication she regains her perspective and is released.
When she learns that she has ‘acted out’ towards James Lasdun, she is mortified. She wrote him angry emails, published spiteful reviews of his work on Amazon and other platforms and said that ‘his wife’s cunt smelled of dead rabbits’. She writes him a ‘sincere apology’ for her ‘horrible behaviour’. She does not retract her judgment of Lasdun as a sexist who fetishizes his female characters, especially ones of colour, of whom Afarin feels – not all that surprisingly – herself to be one.
*
In 2013 James Lasdun published his memoir Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. The text of this book was assembled from abusive and threatening emails that Afarin (who is called ‘Nasreen’ in Lasdun’s account) wrote to him after she had lost her mind. The emails were viewed by Lasdun and his publisher as explosive, revelatory and interesting enough to merit publication.
Not surprisingly Afarin’s hate mail, on its own, was too thin to sustain a complete narrative. So the author and his publishers decided to make a book that was plumped out with several loosely-connected parallel narratives. Lasdun works in these seemingly disparate themes to assemble a text of adequate length to make a book.
Afarin’s prose is tough, unrelenting and always on target. Her account of being given the run around by New York agents is heart-breaking. Everyone saw her potential, but no one was prepared to cut her a break – especially not after Lasdun called her a stalker. After the racism, sexual abuse, and actual rape it is perhaps not surprising that Afarin’s career is brought to a halt before it can get started. Afarin’s hate mail was evidence of her madness, of her suffering. It also gave Lasdun, whose career was in the doldrums, a nearly ready-made book.
*
These two books are parables – perhaps more like cautionary tales – for the digital age. Afarin’s book is self-published and is only available as a print on demand or as a Kindle from Amazon. Her reviews of Lasdun that he found offensive were published on the Amazon readers’ reviews page and were eventually taken down at Lasdun’s request. Lasdun’s book had the benefit of a major publisher’s advance and the publicity budget to go with it. The key textual element of Lasdun’s memoir is emails sent to him by Afarin, which are the backbone of it – her gift to him.
As a ‘public person’ it is difficult sometimes to let go of our amour propre in the digital age. ‘Nasreen’ says it best: ‘Your reputation is ass.’
Reading these two books side by side is an unsettling experience. The lasting impression is of Goliath prevailing over David.

[Lara Sackey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Afarin Majidi is a tour de force author who takes us with her on an odyssey of whirlwind mind unravelling from girlhood to her pre-middle aged breaking point. Starting out in Iran with the fall of the Shah's government, her family exiles from their country and comes to the shock of New Jersey, where they are thrown into American culture and a tumultuous scene in and out of the home. Majidi's studious silence is broken when she becomes sexual at fourteen. Sex gives her strength and power in the chaos of her family's house, but also awakens a strained relationship with her mother that rides throughout the book. In this memoir, Majidi's body is her homeland, her people, beautiful and powerful and abused and bludgeoned. As the storyline moves, we move with her in her genius wordcraft. When Majidi is disoriented, we are disoriented. When she is stoned, we are stoned. When she is determined, we are determined. When she is hurt, we are hurt. The author in her unrestrained honesty brings you in to her vivid thoughtful world, and her vivid thoughtful madness. Her self-aware observations of a mind on the brink are deep, at times humorous, and extraordinary. Do read this stormy jewel!

[Cathy Bertrand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it! 😍 Her novel ZIBA is now available.
The voice and story in this memoir are unforgettable. It's a must-read!

Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror is not what I expected it to be. I thought it would be an angry #MeToo story, with a lot of hand wringing and sobbing. What it was instead was wholly entertaining, disturbing and fascinating. It was like walking through a series of dark poems.

While Majidi’s childhood is wrought with sadness and unimaginable losses, like her family having to escape Iran at the onset of the Islamic Revolution, Majidi is never sentimental, not even when her cousin is murdered because he’s Iranian. Not even after she’s raped. We’re given details, all except her feelings, which she explains as numbness. Her candor and understatement make her story even more powerful.

Alex is the only man out of a string of exes who seems to have mattered to her and in the memoir. Because she’s not Jewish, his family not only forbids him to marry her but they begin pressuring him into dates with Jewish girls. After the break-up, Majidi enters one abusive relationship after the next, with men who seem to find pleasure in physically and sexually hurting her. It’s frustrating as a reader to watch her make the same mistakes repeatedly, but this is what battered women do; they keep going back or they find another abuser (or the abuser finds them).

The author seems to see a correlation between being Muslim-Iranian and the maltreatment she received from men, even close friends, post-9/11. Even though she doesn’t make a very strong case for it, the question does linger. What is clear is that she picks the wrong people to surround herself with, in general. It’s also clear that her mother broke down her boundaries about how to be treated long ago.

Madness or Stream of Consciousness?

We (and she) only later find out that she’s bipolar, and the funny part of the book is that she talks often about her former professor James Lasdun and editor Joyce Johnson in the same sentences. She couldn’t have picked a better allusion to James Joyce, whose most unconventional prose echoes here in Majidi’s breakdowns. Stream of consciousness it’s not, but it could easily be called its close cousin.

This memoir made me think about what’s considered art and what’s considered madness, especially in relation to her professor, James Lasdun. I have not read his memoir about the author, which seems exploitive, to say the least. But why is he considered an artist for exploiting her after she was raped, and she’s considered a stalker for writing about him? And why did he not help her when he saw that she was sick? Why is it acceptable to be so cold?
If you enter Majidi’s world when she’s in a manic episode, you can see there is some sense in her madness. It’s as if she is going through her days explicating one frightening poem after another instead of dealing with the trauma and abandonment she’s experienced. Sometimes it feels as if she’s deciphering mystical signs that others can’t see. And if you follow the unreasonable logic of her thinking, the whole situation does become a frightening metaphor for what’s happening in the world.

I didn’t know a lot about Iran, but I’m seeing that Majidi’s family was very Westernized but were persecuted for being Iranian in the U.S.. It seems that her early recollections of childhood violence during the revolution may have unleashed some of her hallucinations while she is in crisis in her thirties. It’s unclear, but what is certain is that what she imagines is absolutely frightening.

Unreliable Narrator? I think not! Bipolar people don't go around thinking they've been battered and raped.

Some readers may feel that Majidi is an unreliable narrator in speaking out about rape, but it was easy to make the distinction between when she’s in crisis and when she’s sane. She also begins to hallucinate shortly after she’s drugged and raped. Getting roofied is nothing new, and it has long been a problem, one that results in many deaths. It was just shocking to learn that it’s a problem in the publishing industry. It seems like the #MeToo movement has yet to crack the magazine and book world.

What Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror lacked was permission to laugh at some of the lighter moments. Because Majidi shows so much restraint in displaying emotion, it’s tough to know when it’s intended to be humorous or serious. I felt guilty laughing at a mentally ill person in distress. She could have trimmed some of her sexual exploits down to brief exposition, but for anyone wanting to watch a lot of drama unfold, there is plenty of sex in this memoir. The writing is strong, and it’s clear that she has plenty of material to draw from when she sets out to finish the novel that never did end up being written.

Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror is a courageous book about surviving domestic violence, sexual assault and mental illness. And yes, Majidi is yet another talented person with bipolar disorder. There is still so much stigma about bipolar disorder and other psychological disorders but Majidi throws caution to the wind and takes us through an experiential ride to show us what it’s like to be trapped in a bell jar.

[Amanda M. Lyons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine for a moment that everything you know about your world has always been in a whirl of uncertainty and loss, no true compass for you to focus on and no clear support for you to build from, what would you do? What can you change when you work terribly hard to come out of the ashes of this life only to fall deeper and deeper as the whole world seems to have gone mad? Is it you, or did people you trusted really hate you so much as to leave you for dead? Is it only in your mind that these fears about conspiracy and destruction dwell, or is there something more to it? What would you do if there was no way to truly know and it only became deeper and darker no matter how you fought to regain your freedom and sense of self? There are many things Afarin Majidi could have done under the circumstances and a great many more ways it might have gone more wrong than it did in the end.

Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror is a glimpse into the mind of a woman swallowed whole by her crumbling mental health and scrambling for some sense of hope that this nightmare will cease. Here you will find a strong narrative account of victimization, the broken homes created in the face of crisis, and the hostile experience of marginalized women even in academia and the publishing world. While I'm not certain its a book that all can read and appreciate, I do see it as a strong example of what it is to be lost in an experience with no hope of consistent support and a clear case for better treatment of women who suffer from mental illness, particularly marginalized women of color.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

*A Thank you to the Author for allowing me to read this. This is my unbiased and honest review*

Actual Rating 3.5

Three words come to mind while reading Majidi's Memoir; Raw, Manic, and Honest. When I read a memoir, sometimes the authors try to present themselves in the way they want to be perceived rather than how they are. This book does not do that. Majidi allows the readers fully into her life, and you read everything. The good, the bad, and the manic. The book is very well written and Majidi does go into a lot of details about her life and experiences in the book. I will say that though I enjoyed the book some of her language in it does make me a little uncomfortable.

Overall, a very emotionally raw memoir.