Gina Nutt: This is an excerpt from a novella. Could you tell us a bit about the book? What inspired this multigenerational story?
Katie Shireen Assef: The story of the diamond of dubious value is my grandmother’s and my parents’  story. At the time of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, my grandmother sent such a diamond to my father, who was studying medicine in California, and my father persuaded my American mother to pose as his Farsi interpreter in the hopes that he and, by extension, the diamond, would come off as more authentic to the appraiser. I’ve long been attached to this story: there’s something tragicomic and even a little slapstick about it, and at the same time it’s involved with questions of authenticity and “passing” and the instability of fortune and the things we’ll do for love—all of which compel me. I had written a bunch of notes around it and then gradually started to feel curious and a little suspicious about my own interest in the story. What does it say about me that I’ve held this story that doesn’t belong to me so close? That was when a fictional form began to take shape, and very soon I knew the daughter would become the central character. But interestingly, the more I write, the more the characters take on their own distinct contours and personal histories; for me, there’s richness and mystery in that abstraction. I knew it was through fiction that I wanted to explore how these stories live on in us and continue to play out in sometimes uncanny patterns of repetition.

GN: Your characters navigate family and personal secrets, the spoken and unsaid, the seen and obscured, proximity and distance. How do you decide when to reveal significant information? When are you inclined to draw out tensions and postpone the revelation?
KSA:  That’s such a lovely question. I think I tend to reveal too much too quickly in early drafts, and in revision become more withholding, more attuned to how and when things are revealed. That’s probably informed by my work as a translator, since I’m always asking myself: can I play with the syntax of this sentence? Or is the order in which the information unfolds essential in some way? And it’s when I’m translating that I’m most alert to how the writer is dealing with these questions at the level of the paragraph, the chapter, the novel or the story as a whole. In this excerpt, I wanted to create a sense of material slowly building up, the way it does through generations of a family, and that in itself is a kind of prolonged tension, I think. Once I had that structure in mind, it felt right for the details about the family’s situation to be revealed in the daughter’s scene, since she’s the recipient of all that material: literally, the diamond is on her finger. And the passage about her marriage and its breakdown sort of naturally followed, since she’s been thinking about what to do with that ring, and then she looks at his text and the whole thing comes flooding back. At the same time, there’s much that’s left unsaid. I’m less interested in the details of what went wrong than in what she’ll do in the aftermath. What sort of clothes will she buy?

GN: During edits, you mentioned zooming in further in these scenes as they progress, the daughter’s concluding scene in particular. What does that process look like for you? What are your foremost considerations when deepening a scene?
KSA: I love that you used “deepening” as opposed to “expanding.” The short and annoying answer, of course, is that it takes time. The process seems to be different for each piece of writing—whatever works for the thing at hand won’t translate to the next thing, in my experience. With this excerpt, I knew I wanted the grandmother’s scene to read almost like a fable, but I had only a vague idea of how the following scenes would hang together. After I’d taken notes and sketched out each scene, it became clear that there would be this increasing sense of accumulation and repetition (which, aptly, means “rehearsal” in French). Then, in revision, I looked at how material from each scene might further inform what goes on in the next one—what each character notices, feels, remembers. How much of all that is heritable? I’m obsessed with this question and with these sorts of patterns, so it’s easy to get carried away. At a few different points, I went back and cut repetitions that felt too on the nose and allowed things that were explicit to be more oblique. The daughter’s connection to flowers, for instance—where does that come from? I know the answer, but the reader, though she might venture a guess, doesn't have to just yet. It seems contradictory, but I think that the process of deepening can have as much to do with cutting away and setting aside as it does with excavating the layers of a moment or a question we’re thinking through.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
KSA: It changes with the seasons; this past winter I mainly hibernated with books. During a week of vicious mistral winds, I read Fleur Jaeggy’s story collection La paura del cielo (Last Vanities as translated by Tim Parks) and its seven grim, violent tales have lingered in my memory. Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin and Kathryn Davis’s The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf both left a similarly vivid impression of disturbance, and the latter had me listening to Danish opera, which was an unexpected delight. More recently, I’ve been going to the movies: Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer, a film that casts an exquisite crepuscular spell, and 7 Walks With Mark Brown, a documentary about plants that almost magically finds a way to let them speak for themselves, have become new favorites. The train that passes along the Côte d’Azur and into Liguria—sometimes so close to the water that you can imagine you’re flying over it—is among the best consolations I’ve found. Once you’re over the border, near Bordighera, the water takes on an otherworldly shade of teal; there must be a scientific explanation for this, but I never want to know it. A few years ago, I saw a contemporary dance piece the entirety of which the dancers performed with their backs to the audience: they were meant to be facing the sea, the horizon. That’s how I want to feel when I write.