Said Sayrafiezadeh

I have to expend an awful lot of energy actively undoing the impact of my name. Understandably, people assume that I have at least some connection to Iran. The truth is that I don't. I have very little knowledge about the culture, the language, the history. I've never been to Iran. I've never even been inside a mosque.

The daily quota I've set for myself is 500 words or approximately a page and a half double-spaced. Which isn't much, except that I'm extremely slow, extremely meticulous. 'Le mot juste' haunts me. On a good day, I will finally secrete the 500th word at about 5 o'clock, and I'll reward myself by going to Housing Works Bookstore to read.

My childhood was defined by my father's absence. His presence looms so large. Up until the age of 18, he was a superstar for me.

I was born in Brooklyn and raised in Pittsburgh. I've never been to Iran, I don't speak the language, and, probably most important of all, my Iranian father left home when I was nine months old. That's the extent of my connection to Iran.

My sister married an American and took his name, and my brother has shortened Sayrafiezadeh to Sayraf. So now he's Jacob Sayraf, or sometimes Jake Sayraf. He made the change when he was a teenager, prior to the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. So I don't think it was motivated by any anti-Iranian sentiment in the United States.

There's always been something a little pathetic for me at the work parties I've attended, especially thinking back to the restaurants I worked in. I remember a Christmas party in which we all got free T-shirts with the restaurant on the front and our names on the back.

I work in the most non-Communist job. I work for 'Martha Stewart Living.'

The difference between our family and other poor families was that my mother actively chose to be poor. She was highly literate, and she had a college degree, but after my father left, she took the first secretarial job she could find and never looked for other employment again.

I wake when my wife wakes, at 7:30 A.M. I'd like to sleep longer, but she has to go off to work, and I'd be plagued with guilt.

More people work at Walmart than anywhere else in the United States, but you wouldn't know that from our literature. I'm trying to get at the reality of this country by portraying the lives of many of my friends who I left behind in Pittsburgh.