The Lion Women of Tehran
The Lion Women of Tehran
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Marjan Kamali on The Lion Women of Tehran
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
An Instagram post and a friendship she thought was goneThe book began in a different novel entirely. Kamali was more than a hundred pages into a story about suburban mothers anxious over their children’s college applications, with an elderly Iranian woman named Miss Ellie running a café in the background. Lockdown arrived, the project lost its footing, and she found herself looking at social media instead of her manuscript.
I was flooded with not just memories but emotions. I felt as though I could remember the texture of our friendship. I could remember her mom. I remembered how we used to play together every day and share our dreams. And I realized how these friendships we make in childhood really shape us because her influence on my life has lasted even though the friendship hasn’t.
That flood of feeling gave her the emotional spine of the novel, but she needed a structural argument to go with it. She found it in an observation about the kind of loss nobody writes elegies for.
Friendship breakups, I feel, are just as heart wrenching as romantic breakups.
She pulled Miss Ellie out of the café, made her a protagonist, and started the book over from the beginning.
The Iran Kamali needed to write about was the Iran of her mother’s generation, not the one she had briefly lived in as a child. To anchor that world in something real, she made a deliberate calculation about her characters’ birth year.
I deliberately made them born the year my mother was born — 1943 — because by doing that, I could show the arc in the background of the women’s rights movement in Iran.
The book was well past its midpoint when the news broke in September 2022 that Mahsa Jina Amini had died in morality police custody and women were marching in the streets of Tehran. Kamali had not yet written her final chapters.
I did change the ending. I hadn’t yet written the end. I hadn’t written it yet. But it made the ending the ending that you have now read. I added a new time period to the book. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
A pink pen, a reluctant mother, and a firm line on historyBecause Kamali had set Ellie and Homa’s birth year to match her own mother’s, she could use her mother as a living research archive. The questions she needed answered were specific enough to make the sessions feel like mild interrogations.
My mom was my number one victim, and she did speak to me. Ellie and Homa go to my mother’s high school. She described it for me, and I needed to know: how were you seated in the classroom? Did you each have a desk? Did you share a desk?
Her creative writing professor at NYU was E.L. Doctorow, and the distinction he drew between history and fiction became the principle she applied to every scene. Simon & Schuster fact-checked the manuscript before publication, so that line between invented and documented had to hold.
I did not make up any historical events. Ellie and Homa I made up. Their friendship I made up. Their families I made up. But the women’s march that happened in Iran in March 1979, I did not make up. Thousands of women did march in the streets for days on end because they were worried about what may come.
She wrote the earliest scenes of Ellie and Homa’s childhood during lockdown, composing longhand rather than at the keyboard. For one scene in particular, a fire that her editor asked her to expand from two paragraphs into a full chapter, she returned to that method deliberately.
I took out my notebook and pen and kind of just sat on the floor, and I find for emotional scenes, tough scenes, most scenes, writing longhand is a very good way to do it. [paraphrased from audio]
Character, not plot, was where she started. The story’s architecture came later, built around people she already knew.
I don’t know the plot at all. I just know the characters. [paraphrased from audio]
The first draft took roughly two and a half years. Revision took a full year beyond that.
The personal thread
The women in her family who gave the title its weightThe Persian phrase at the heart of the title, shir zan, is a term Kamali grew up hearing, but she wanted readers to understand exactly what it contained before they encountered it in the novel. She explained the phrase during a January 2025 interview.
Shīr means lion, zan means women. And it’s a phrase that I heard when I was growing up, and it basically is a label for women who are very strong and don’t take any nonsense, and who are opinionated and vocal and resilient. [paraphrased from audio]
The phrase was not abstract in her household. Her grandmother had embodied it in 1940s Tehran, at a time when a woman holding a full-time job was genuinely unusual. Her aunt had paid a different price for the same refusal to be silent.
Just coming from a long line of these very, very strong women. We call them ‘lion women,’ which is where the title comes from. Just fierce women who fight the patriarchy. And my grandmother was literally one of the first career women to have a full-time career. She would get dressed in her very fancy outfits, go off to the office every morning. She had four children. And in 1940s Iran, she was part of the first wave. [paraphrased from audio]
Her aunt was arrested as a university student activist. The characters in the novel are their own people, Kamali has been careful to say, but the history her grandmother and aunt lived is the history the book is built on.
On what’s at stake
Rights assumed, rights revokedThe arc Kamali traces across the novel is precisely designed to make a particular shock land: the moment when rights that felt permanent turn out not to be. She placed Ellie and Homa in 1960s Iran, when women won the right to vote and marriage and custody laws shifted in their favor, so readers would feel what the characters felt before the reversal came.
Freedom is not guaranteed. There was a time which we see in the book when women thought they were good. They were done; they were guaranteed these rights. And then we see that the pendulum can swing, and those rights can be taken away.
The warning inside that arc was not aimed only at Iranian readers. Kamali wanted the experience of watching Ellie and Homa’s world contract to feel like evidence rather than history.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how the friends we make when we are young shape us. Their influence lasts even if the friendship doesn’t.
The two arguments run together in the novel: that what we think is secured can be stripped away, and that what we think is lost can quietly persist. Both turn out to be true for Ellie and Homa.
What she wants us to sit with
Catharsis, estrangement, and the friendships that outlast themselvesHoma, one of the novel’s two protagonists, survives events that cost her almost everything. Kamali was deliberate about not leaving her there. The question she kept returning to while writing was how a person rebuilds after that kind of loss, and she found the answer in the writing itself.
I personally found just as the writer a tremendous amount of catharsis in her courage and her ability to regain her confidence and to step into who she was again.
Ellie and Homa spend most of the novel estranged from each other. Their separation spans decades. Kamali’s point is not that the friendship failed but that it continued to work on both of them whether they were in contact or not.
You don’t need to stay in touch. You don’t need to continue the friendship for that friendship’s influence to matter and to shape you as a person.
That claim is the book’s quietest argument, and in some ways its most hopeful one: the people who shaped us don’t stop shaping us when they leave.