20Something: Iman
“The strongest decision that you can make for yourself is walking away from something that no longer serves you.”
The date is September 10th, 2022. I’m standing in line at the Printers Row Lit Fest in the sweltering Chicago heat, a trail of sweat trickling down into my pink cowboy boots. I clutch a brightly-illustrated book in my hand as I step forward a spot, following the movements of the several other trendily-dressed, book-clutching girls in front of me. As I reach the front of the line, a woman comes into view. Long locks of dark hair sneak over her shoulder from their resting place behind her ear, and she’s wearing a shirt that reads, “I like to read but I’m also hot” in a bold serif font. On her feet are the most fabulous pair of cowboy boots I’ve ever laid eyes on (I tell her so when I reach the table, flashing my own pink pair at the same time so as to let her know that I am also a Hot Cowboy-Boot-Wearing Girl Who Reads). She signs my book, we chat for a minute, and then I’m ushered away so that the next Hot Girl Who Reads can take her turn. As I walk away, I open my book to look at the inscription. “There is only one Ellie <3,” it reads. Signed, Iman Hariri-Kia.
I had discovered her on TikTok a few months prior, after a video promoting her impending debut novel, A Hundred Other Girls, went viral. I’m a sucker for a colorful book cover and a girl-takes-on-world storyline, so it took about five seconds for me to decide to pre-order it. Since then, I’ve become more and more enraptured with Iman’s journey, following her through the decision to quit her corporate job and write full time, the success that ensued, and most recently, the announcement of an upcoming sophomore novel.
When I open our scheduled Zoom interview on a sunny July afternoon almost a year later, the same long, dark tresses and warm smile greet me. She addresses me like a friend, telling me it’s good to see me again. I return the sentiment.
“I feel like I know a lot about you just from seeing your life on the internet and doing my little stalker-y research,” I tell her. She buries her face in her hands as if she’s still not used to strangers knowing things about her, despite having an easily Google-able trail of bylines, profiles, and social media pages. But those can only go so far when getting to know a person, so I ask her to start by giving me her career story in an elevator pitch.
In her own words, Iman is a writer, editor, and author hailing from the big apple (okay, “big” and “apple” were my words - I don’t think native New Yorkers actually use that term). “I guess I always knew I wanted to write in some capacity,” she starts. “Throughout my life, my short, limited years on this planet [28 to be exact], I feel like that has taken on a lot of different forms, but the only consistency has been my desire to write.”
She was published for the first time in high school: an op-ed in the Huffington Post about her experience with Islamophobia in a post-9/11 New York City, where she was born and raised. She spent her late high school and early college years freelancing in a “low-stakes environment,” sending pitches to online publications with varying degrees of success. In college, she studied creative writing and music composition, the latter of which she describes as her original dream job.
Instead, her first post-grad position was as an editorial assistant at Teen Vogue, then in the midst of what Iman describes as a “socio-political revolution.” She tells me it was an exciting time to be there, but when the print magazine folded in 2017, she headed for Bustle as a lifestyle staff writer. “It was like bootcamp for staff writing,” she jokes. It was there that she found her groove under the Sex & Relationships umbrella, finding it to be “a great continuation of the work that I had been doing since school… I’m really fascinated by women’s bodies and the ways in which young people, marginalized people, are taught about their sexuality and given sexual agency. So I really started to dissect that.”
After Bustle it was on to Elite Daily, with a column for Man Repeller on the side, and then back to Bustle to head up their S&R vertical before eventually landing at Her Campus, where she worked on re-launching their national site. That brings us to the summer of 2022, when she decided to leave her full-time editorial work a month before her debut novel was published.
Immediately, I hit her with the question that burns in my mind whenever I meet someone who has made a career out of their creative passion: How do you grapple with turning something you’re passionate about into your job?
She tells me she feels lucky to have always been driven by purpose, but explains that the path to being a writer in the manner she is now has not been a straight one. “I love looking at storytelling as, like, a jigsaw puzzle… staring at it and trying to figure out how to make the pieces fit, and fixing it slowly… I love it. It feeds me, and it still feels right… [But] for a very long time, I wanted to be a lyricist. So I actually had to go through the experience of really, sort of, professionally pursuing songwriting and realizing that doing it in practice didn’t make me as happy as it did in theory. And I had to walk away from something I’d committed a lot of time and energy and resources to in order to fully embrace my editorial career.” So don’t get it twisted: even those of us who seem the most steadfast in our endeavors aren’t always blessed with a linear timeline.
Iman says the biggest challenge she’s faced in her transition to a full time Hot Girl Who Reads and Also Writes has been “maintaining that joy, and that love for your craft, for your art, for your work, when it no longer belongs to you. When so much of it is reliant on the way that it’s perceived and consumed.”
“How have you navigated being in the public eye and having so many eyes and opinions on your work?” I ask. At the time of our interview, she has amassed 22,000 followers on Instagram and 30,000 on TikTok, with a like count that has surpassed 4.5 million.
“I really thought I was going to be prepared for it,” she laughs. After all, she’s been publishing her work online and in print for almost a decade. It was exciting at first, she explains: “You’re getting tagged in all of these positive reviews, and people are reaching out to tell you they’re buying the book, and you’re getting numbers and sales reports, and, you know, I think that it can be overwhelming and exciting and your emotions are permanently heightened.” It sounds like the recipe for an adrenaline rush.
But then comes the seemingly inevitable human experience of reading a piece of negative feedback, and realizing that in one mere sentence, someone has bulldozed through all of the praise you’ve ever received. Her solution to this is simple: “I don’t read my reviews. Ever. I don’t go on Goodreads, I try not to read the reviews that people tag me in… that’s sort of, like, a hard line that I have drawn in the sand for myself.”
Now seems like a perfect time to make this about me! Thus, I regale her with an account of my years as a ballerina, and the time when a singular teacher’s remarks derailed nearly every ounce of confidence I had (kisses to her if she’s reading this!). I reflect on that moment often, wondering how I let the words of an individual overpower the praise I had received from so many others before her. Growing up, I was told by many a teacher and family friend and even, on occasion, a rogue audience member, that I was born for the stage (this must be the reason behind my undying penchant for elevated surfaces. To be a woman is to perform). And yet, one woman’s words planted a seed of doubt that was doomed to grow for eternity.
All of this begs the question: why do we, seemingly so devoted to our hobbies and passions and callings, allow an outside opinion or two change our entire self-perception? It shouldn’t be so easy.
With her second book, Iman plans to set her boundaries a step further. “My big goal for me right now as I’m entering year two of being a full-time writer is getting back to that sense of joy and purpose and comfort that exists, sort of, internally, and can be separated from the other peoples’ perception and reception of me and my work, whether it’s positive or negative.”
Then, again, being present online has been instrumental in helping her market her first book and connect with her audience. “It’s a thin line to walk,” she admits. Truthfully, I think many of us could afford to examine that line in our own lives - at what point in any of our ventures is it more prudent to shut out the noise than to internalize feedback?
While we’re on the topic of readership, I ask Iman for her prediction on the future of long-form writing in an age of dwindling attention spans. It’s something that I, with my miniscule readership, ponder often with mounting concern. If you can’t tell by now, I’m partial to verbosity (I’m working on it, okay!) and flowery storytelling. I guess I can’t blame anyone for preferring a 2 minute TikTok to my written sagas, but I worry about where our society is headed if we can’t bring ourselves to read more than five paragraphs without taking an Instagram break.
“I do think that there is always going to be a forum for really, really great long-form reporting and writing… Whenever I read a really great feature, it’s all I can think about for, like, a year.” I laughingly tell her about my obsession with Edith Zimmerman’s 2014 profile of Chris Evans, which I read like a bedtime story (does anyone have a hot actor for me to interview?? I am willing to spend a weekend with him).
But while some of us marvel at great storytelling or gush over a particularly enticing feature story, she admits that she can see the future of long-form writing being bleaker than we’d like, especially for people from marginalized backgrounds who have had even less of a platform in the past. It’s easy enough for a white woman (me) to get up on a soap box (this blog) and garner praise for her ramblings. But for someone who wasn’t born into privilege and abundance of resources, the playing field has yet to be leveled.
“I really believe in representation, not tokenization," she says. “And I think that true representation is giving people from different marginalized backgrounds the opportunity to write about everything under the sun, and they will bring themselves, they will bring their identity to those topics… Me as a Middle Eastern woman, as an Iranian woman, being able to write about my relationship, to beauty, to fashion, to health and physical fitness, to all of the above - I’m going to be bringing my cultural background into that storytelling because it’s a part of the way I navigate the world.”
Both her debut novel and her upcoming one feature Iranian-American women as the main characters. However, it’s important to note that neither plot is dependent on the main character’s heritage. It’s in this manner that Iman focuses on representation, rather than tokenization. She says of her second novel’s FMC, “You’ll see the way she interacts with her heritage prop up as she sort of navigates the shit storm of a chaos plot, but this isn’t a story about her coming to grips with her race, religion, or heritage, which, again, I think would have fallen under tokenization territory.”
The moral of this story is that the onus falls on us, as consumers of media in any form, to seek out work by people from different backgrounds than our own (if you’re a fellow cis white reader, I’m looking at you baby!). Exposing ourselves to different narratives and perspectives is essential to being able to empathize with others and understand the complexities of varied human experiences.
So much of what Iman has said so far feels like my own thoughts have been plucked from my brain and recited back to me. Perhaps it’s some sort of understanding between two girls who love words, or perhaps it’s the fact that no matter what life throws at us in our early adulthood, the same lessons can be extracted across the board. As we both thumb at the stacks of gold necklaces that circle our necks, it dawns on me that while she’s someone I look up to as a writer, someone who’s life I’ve come to revere through my screen, we are both just a couple of 20-something girls.
“What’s been the best year of your 20s,” I ask her, “and what’s been the worst?”
“Definitely 27” is the answer to both. “Having your dreams come true is the weirdest fucking experience in the world because you feel absolutely elated, you’ve got the craziest imposter syndrome, you’re so excited and anxious at the same time, constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. You’re flooded with new experiences, you feel guilt, like you don't deserve what’s happening to you… it’s a mixed bag.”
You mean to tell me that all of those emotions are still present, even at the pinnacle of personal success??
Rollercoaster of emotions aside, she still describes last year as the best year of her life: she quit her job, started writing full time, published her first novel, and got engaged. It’s hard to imagine a better year than that. But of course, as life is wont to show us, we encounter some of our grayest days in the midst of the sunshine.
“I lost my grandmother exactly a month after my book published… It was my first experience with grief on that scale,” she says. The thought of having to toe the line between such immense joy and such devastating loss seems overwhelming to me.
“I had a six-month period where I just could not put my finger on the pulse of, like, what I was feeling. I couldn’t nail down my emotional state, I was constantly running haywire.” She reflects that the things that brought her so much joy, like sharing her book with the world and loving someone without barriers, meant accepting the pain that’s tied to them as the course of life means their eventual, yet inevitable, end. She’s made peace with the idea that great happiness means nothing without great sadness. “So that was 27 for me,” she smiles.
I make a mental note to carry this reminder with me as I navigate one of the more difficult seasons of my life: there is no good without bad, and equally, no bad without good. The ups and downs of life are intertwined, and it’s during the downs that I think we’d (okay, I’d) do well to remember that.
And what about her dreams? I don’t think I’ve met anyone yet whose dreams have come true before they hit 30 - she is the needle in the 20-something haystack. Does she have more dreams, I wonder? New ones?
She says that while 27-year-old Iman would have described her dream as a #1 New York Times Bestseller and TV adaptation on HBO, her 28-year-old self knows that those accolades mean nothing if you’re not able to enjoy them.
“The second you achieve great success, you start focusing on the next thing,” she laughs. “When the dust settled, I was like, ‘what’s next?’ Now, my dream is to continue telling stories on a large scale, while protecting my mental health and feeling good in my body and my brain. I want to continue doing exactly what I’m doing, while also taking care of myself.”
We’ve just about run the gamut of my questions, and I know she needs to get back to work - this week, she’s doing an entire read-through and edit of her next book.
Just as I’m about to deliver my closing spiel (“This has been great, I’ll be writing the article over the next few days, you can expect to hear from me by Tuesday,”) she interrupts me: “Can I say one more thing? You didn’t ask, but I want to say…”
The floor is hers.
“The greatest lesson that I learned in my early 20s, and I’m so glad I learned it then, because it’s come up constantly since, is that the greatest strength, like, the strongest decision that you can make for yourself is walking away from something that no longer serves you.”
I can’t believe the words I’m hearing. Just a month ago, I quit what I thought was my dream job in order to salvage my own mental health (unemployment hard launch!!!). It took me weeks of after-work menty b’s to feel brave enough to walk away. So often, we stay in jobs, or relationships, or cities that don’t serve us because we’re afraid to let people down. I think, if we looked a bit harder within, we’d find that the people we are most reluctant to let down are ourselves .
I can see a look of relief come over my own face in the Zoom window as Iman continues, “The greatest lesson we can learn… is that you’re not quitting when you walk away. You're not giving up when you walk away. You’re not doing anything weak. You're actually doing something really strong when you say, ‘The person that I am today no longer needs this to feel happy.’”
When I email her the preview of this piece a week later, she apologizes for the last minute interruption.
“Omg omg do not apologize for interrupting,” I type back, “that was the best nugget of wisdom!!”
Hero image credit: Louisiana Mei Gelpi