Mojgan Ghazirad: A breakfast conversation

On Beauty, Flavor, and Memory

For subscribers both free and paid

In the coming months, Poor Man’s Feast will be featuring breakfast conversations with a wide variety of artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers. It will almost always include a recipe.

Each conversation will be released in full for paid subscribers only and live in the archives. Free subscribers will have access to a portion of the conversation, as always. A portion of the proceeds of every breakfast conversation will be donated to a number of organizations dedicated to feeding children at both the macro and micro levels, beginning with Save the Children.

Thank you - Elissa

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Mojgan Ghazirad, author of The House on Sun Street

We live in a world of tumult, of abject chaos — my physicist friends tell me the universe is chaos — which is Greek for the word abyss, or void. This never seems to change, as evidenced by the withering events unfolding in the world around us. In 1979, when I was a sixteen-year-old teenager in Queens, New York listening to the Beatles, and playing softball every day after high school, and my worries were mostly limited to surviving the wrath of a very messy divorce and where I was going to go to college, another country half a world away was devolving into revolution. Everything Iran had been known for — its art and language, its beauty and history, its utterly magnetic poetry — was changing; from where I sat, thousands of miles away, it was like watching a thick scrim be pulled down over a stunning culture that had given so much to the world.

And yet: A light here requires a shadow there, said Mrs. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse. Where there is darkness, there is light. It is this light — this possibility of love, and peace, memory, and beauty — that is foundational in novelist Mojgan Ghazirad’s astonishingly beautiful debut novel, The House on Sun Street, which tells the story of a young girl growing up in Tehran in the days leading up to and during the Islamic Revolution. As the world collapses around her and everything she knows to be safe is turned upside down, young Moji’s education, her family, her gender, and her culture are imperiled.

A native of Iran, Mojgan Ghazirad graduated from Tehran University of Medical Sciences with a medical degree. A neonatalogist, she studied pediatrics at Inova Children’s Hospital and received her neonatal medicine specialty from George Washington University. She currently works as an assistant professor of pediatrics at the George Washington University Hospital and Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC. Her essays and short stories in English have appeared in Longreads, Michigan Quarterly Review, Idaho Review, New Orleans Review, Nowruz Journal, The Common, Assignment, Best American Travel Writing 2020, etc. Her Persian writings have been published in Zanan, Hengam, Shargh Daily, and Salamat Magazine.

Mojgan has published three collections of short stories in Farsi in Iran and Europe: A Lover in White Jacket in 2012 in Iran, Turquoise Dream in 2014 in Germany, and her last collection In the Solitude of Suitcases in 2016 in the UK. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in January 2018. The House on Sun Street was published in October 2023.

Here are some of Mojgan’s thoughts about breakfast:

EA: Of all meals, breakfast seems to me to be the most personal and ritualistic. What is on your table every morning?

MG: Nowadays, when I come back home from my call in the NICU, my husband and I try our best to have breakfast together. He often comes home earlier than me from his shift in the hospital and prepares the breakfast table that is set near our backyard window. He brews the cardamom tea in our electric samovar, fries a pair of eggs with pul biber spice for the two of us, and serves it with the mint we have grown in our garden and a half circle flat bread we buy from the Middle Eastern market near our home. I love this breakfast ritual since it has become the only time my husband and I have together in our busy life of overnight working physicians. 

EA: I've found that the children of breakfast people tend to grow up to be breakfast people. Is this true in your case? Did you grow up in a breakfast-loving household? What was your childhood breakfast tradition like? 

MG: I remember the days I was a little girl in my grandparent’s garden when I woke up early in the morning on the weekends. We slept on the wooden divans under mosquito canopies during the summertime on the cool terrace. As the chill of the early morning woke me up, I could smell the aroma of my grandmother’s special breakfast for the weekends which was called haleem from her kitchen. She rose before dawn to stir the simmering wheat and mashed lamb in a giant cauldron. It was my favorite dish, a sweet, golden porridge garnished with melted butter, confectioners’ sugar, and cinnamon. We used to have that breakfast after we had folded the mattresses and spread a tablecloth on the divan rug. Haleem was served with sesame Sangak bread that my grandfather had just bought from the neighborhood bakery. The sweet porridge was a bond between the family, a kind of sweet amalgam that connected us around the table during the heated political debates of the weekends.