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

Laleh Khadivi's latest novel, 'Female Life on Planet Earth,' delves into the complex relationship between mothers and daughters, exploring how hidden pasts can reshape our understanding of family. The protagonist Heti, an Iranian-American accountant living in Los Angeles with her two daughters, Ava and Zora, receives startling photographs after her mother's death that challenge everything she thought she knew about her family.

The images show a younger version of Heti's mother veiled in black, carrying a machine gun and pointing it at handcuffed women in miniskirts. This discovery forces Heti to confront the possibility that her mother may have been an enforcer of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, a stark contrast to the 'manners and sweetness' she remembered.

Revolutionary Secrets

Khadivi doesn't explicitly state whether Heti's mother was involved in revolutionary activities, instead focusing on the emotional impact of these revelations on her daughter. The photographs create a 'shock of affinity' for Heti, who finds herself strangely reassured by the idea that she and her mother might have more in common than she previously believed.

Domestic and Cosmic

The novel alternates between Heti's suburban life in Los Angeles and more cosmic reflections, with chapters named after planets or physics terms. This structure creates a narrative that shifts between the mundane and the metaphysical, sometimes unevenly but always thoughtfully. Heti's daily encounters—from soccer fields to wholesale supermarkets to accounting work on a soft porn film set—become venues for her to process her mother's potential revolutionary past.

Khadivi uses these contrasting settings to explore how personal identity intersects with larger historical and political forces. When Heti works on the porn set, she reflects on how 'a woman's pleasure can destroy her,' drawing connections between personal freedom and the restrictive environment of revolutionary Iran.

Generational Legacies

The novel's most compelling moments come when Khadivi draws parallels between Heti's mother's potential revolutionary zeal and her daughter Zora's climate activism. Zora declares her willingness to take 'extreme things, like take hostages, or destroy oil tankers' to address the climate crisis, creating an intriguing mirror to her grandmother's hidden history.

This parallel challenges readers to question how easily we judge the actions of previous generations while potentially overlooking the radicalism of our own causes. As Heti comes to understand, the novel suggests that the more important question may not be what we inherit, but what we choose to become. The narrative ultimately explores how daughters can carry forward, resist, or remake the legacies they receive from their mothers.