Oral history interview with Abdi Nazemian, 2019 November 8

This oral history interview with Abdi Nazemian was conducted by Sankar Raman and Nancy E. Dollahite on November 8, 2019. The interview was recorded for The Immigrant Story, an organization that documents and archives the stories of immigrants and refugees in the United States.

In this interview, Nazemian discusses his family background and early life in Paris, France; Toronto, Canada; and New York City. He shares the reasons his family left Iran for France, then Canada; talks about his experience growing up multilingual and about raising his own children to also be multilingual; and about adjusting to life in the United States. He discusses his cultural and ethnic identity, and his identity as a gay man, and talks about how those identities inform his writing. He speaks about his experiences and education at a boarding school in New York, talks about coming out to his family in his twenties, and describes his early career as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, California. He speaks at length about writing books telling queer Iranian stories, and about his writing process. He closes the interview by talking about how the AIDS pandemic affected him, by describing the themes of his novels, and by discussing public reception of his novels.