Female Life on Planet Earth by Laleh Khadivi review – a mother’s secret past in the Iranian revolution

“It’s a little scary, isn’t it, inheritance?” That’s what Heti, the protagonist of Laleh Khadivi’s latest novel, remarks to a “soccer mom” as they watch their daughters play. “We don’t get to choose what we inherit. Or what we pass on.” Heti, who lives in Los Angeles, is Iranian-American and works for an accountancy firm. She has two daughters, Ava and Zora, and her mother has recently died. When Ava scores a goal, the soccer mom asks, “Did she get that from you?”, but Heti is less interested in the skills that parents pass to their children than the secrets they keep from them.

Khadivi’s novel is about mothers and the mysteries they contain. In Female Life on Planet Earth she asks what happens when the people closest to us turn out to be strangers. How do we manage our grief and memorialise our loss when those we love have hidden awful parts of their lives? At the beginning of the book, Heti receives strict instructions from an Iranian aunt about the correct way to mark her mother’s passing. “One year after the death you throw a party,” she is told, “so that [people] can think about your mother, really remember and mourn her.” But then Heti receives a startling set of photographs from an unknown sender. In one image, a younger version of her mother stands veiled in black, a machine gun slung over her shoulder. In a second image, the weapon is extended towards a group of handcuffed women, “their miniskirts uneven on their hips, rips in their tight sweaters”, some crying before the camera, another lying prone, “face pressed into the concrete floor”.

Could her mother have been a merciless enforcer of the Islamic Revolution in Iran? Khadivi doesn’t pose the question so bluntly. Instead, she allows the impact of the images to reverberate for Heti. The pictures with the gun are disturbing, but it is the “shock of affinity” that startles her most of all. “Even though I’m terrified by these pictures, I understand her urge to have control … For the tiniest second I was weirdly reassured that my mother wasn’t all manners and sweetness and that maybe we had more in common than I thought.”

Later, she visits her local library and reads about all-female militias, women who in “their newfound zeal … found the punishment of their sisters, the task assigned them by the revolutionaries, to be a satisfying outlet of power”. It’s a grimly fascinating history, but Khadivi is less interested in raking over the political complexities than in attending to the dissonance it stirs in Heti. She allows Heti to puzzle through her uncertain feelings in a novel that fluctuates in tone, serious and sardonic, analytical and droll by turns.

The drollery is partly an effect of the book’s structure – a series of vignettes dotted over the course of a year in which Heti wrestles with big issues in incongruous places. On the soccer pitch, she is bemused by the mom who complains, “You can’t believe all that Barbie feminist crap.” At the wholesale supermarket, with its “maze of open freezers filled with thirty pound turkeys”, she wonders if she is remembering her mother “as she really was or as I want her to be”. Doing the accounts on the set of a soft porn film, she decides that what “happens in these shoots is a kind of freedom … Where I came from, where my mother and I were born, a woman’s pleasure can destroy her.”

Standing in contrast to the comic parts of Heti’s suburban life is Khadivi’s more cosmic sensibility – suggested by the book’s title. Chapters are named for planets or taken from terms in physics, but the shift between the domestic and the metaphysical can make reading an uneven experience. Khadivi can be grandiose: “At night, Heti’s soul ranged and she followed. Without direction or orientation her thoughts spread into undefined time and limitless space.” At other times, the cosmos is an effective analogy: the “emotional gravity” of Heti’s experience pulls her “into a freefall” that feels like grasping at Jupiter’s vaporous atmosphere. In such circumstances, as Heti tells her daughters, “either you fall and fall or you figure out how to fly …”

When Zora later expresses her determination to act on the climate crisis, she tells her mother that “it’s going to be our job to do the extreme things, like take hostages, or destroy oil tankers, or stop eating meat just to get people to care. I’m ready to do any of those.” Khadivi positions Zora’s radicalism as an intriguing mirror to that of her grandmother, quietly challenging any easy assumptions a reader might have about the rights of one and the wrongs of another. If mothers can conceal their lives from their daughters, Khadivi is right to point to how daughters can carry forward, resist or remake the legacies they inherit. As Heti comes to understand in this intriguing and unusual novel, perhaps the more important question may be not what we inherit, but what we choose to become.