Shappi Khorsandi
The Iranian-born comic turned novelist tells Bryony Gordon about bisexuality, single motherhood and feeling English
On being bisexual, a single mum – and very patriotic
When one is interviewing a first-time novelist, it is important to ask them how much of their fictional book is based on fact. These are simply the rules of interviewing, however stupid they may be; when said book is about a teenage alcoholic with a fondness for both men and women, it’s always worth throwing the question out there.
Shappi Khorsandi, comedian and writer, sits in the kitchen of her west London home considering this line of inquiry. We are here discussing her second book, Nina Is Not OK, a tome that is moving, funny and shocking all at once, an almost perfect description of the empty highs and crashing lows of addiction.
Her first, A Beginner’s Guide to
Acting English, was a memoir about moving to England from Tehran and trying to fit in. In her second, her protagonist, Nina, is subject to a sexual assault.
“You’ve asked that question in the most polite and indirect way,” she smiles. “I had a woman the other day who said” – and here Khorsandi puts on a gentle, Scottish lilt – “‘So, Shappi, have you yourself been raped?’ Kudos for asking, but…” (And no, Khorsandi has not been.)
OK, I say. Has she had experience of addiction?
“Well, that’s interesting. I will tell you that I have had recovery for addiction which was food-based.”
As a teenager, she was bulimic, but she is keen not to dwell on it.
“I don’t mind it being public. But I don’t feel the need to spell out my own experiences; I don’t ever want to be put in a position where I’m having to explain addiction to someone who isn’t an addict.”
She is more forthcoming on the topic of sexuality; she made Nina bisexual partly as a way to make up for the experiences she wasn’t able to have as a teenager. “I remember when I was 17, I had massive crushes on girls and I absolutely didn’t know what to do about it,” she says, very matter-of-fact. “I had a snog with one girl who was an out-lesbian and quite superior about it, and she ended up laughing at me and making me feel pathetic and it really upset me.”
She did date a woman, briefly, a few years ago. “But she was far too young. I forgot how tenacious you are when you are a twentysomething. It didn’t work out, for reasons that were nothing to do with her gender.”
Nina, explains Khorsandi, “is my little way of being happy for this generation and my children’s generation, because they will live in a world where it’s completely fine. It won’t be a big bloody issue.”
She takes a gulp of her tea. “I sometimes wonder if same-sex marriage had been legal when I was a teenager – if our culture was that if you had a problem with homosexuality, you were in the minority – then I wonder if I would have had more meaningful relationships with women. But, you know, I didn’t really have meaningful relationships with men until my thirties, either.”
She laughs. Khorsandi was married to fellow comic Christian Reilly until 2011; they have a son together, Cassius, who is eight, and she has a three-yearold daughter, Genevieve, through another relationship.
She is pleasingly pragmatic about being a single-ish mum (she has a wonderful boyfriend who dotes on the children). “I went to South Africa for a job when she was 10 weeks old. I had to. Well, I say ‘I had to’, when actually I was on safari, doing this minidocumentary tracking rhinos, and it was a dream come true. I had bought this house when I was pregnant. It was really out of my means. And I stood there in my new kitchen,” at this she points to the fridge, “with absolutely no money, thinking ‘what the f--- am I going to do? I’m a single mother with a five-year-old and a 10-week-old with no money!’
“And literally the next morning, I got the call asking if I could go and do the job in South Africa. When you’re self-employed, you have to be able to trust that someone will get a tummy bug and you’ll be called on to step up.”
Shappi Khorsandi was born 43 years ago in Tehran, the daughter of Hadi Khorsandi, a writer and poet who satirised Ayatollah Khomeini, leading the family to flee during the Revolution and set up home in Ealing, where she has lived more or less ever since. She spent her childhood looking for terrorists in shopping centres and checking under cars for bombs; one day Scotland Yard came round to inform the family that they had uncovered a plot to kill her father. She has not been back to the country since she was five. “I’d love to go out to Iran. Really, I get so jealous of Brits who go snowboarding there. I would love to walk by the Damavand mountains and all that. But it would be very dangerous for me.”
She talks about Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe, the 37-year-old British mother who has been held in Iran for more than 100 days; her two-year-old daughter has had her passport confiscated and is staying with her Iranian grandparents.
“At the very least they can wrap you up in bureaucracy. If I had to live a day without my kids because of those so and sos…” She bristles. “It’s not worth it.”
Khorsandi was brought up without a religion and earlier this year became president of the British Humanist Society. She says that to see how Iranian she is “you only have to hide my tweezers for a week”, but she feels English, and her new show, Oh My Country! From Morris Dancing to Morrissey, opened this week at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. “It’s about claiming England as mine, as a space I share with others,” she says. “People have said to me, ‘But you weren’t born here’, and I say, ‘But neither was Joanna Lumley, neither was Boris Johnson, neither was Eddie Izzard. Is Joanna an Indian actress? Is Boris an American? Is Eddie a Yemeni comedian?’ ”
She says that she is incredibly patriotic. “Britain is a political construct, but England is a country. It’s about reclaiming that feeling of being at one with the land that you inhabit and loving it and the culture and the language.”
She preferred writing a novel to writing stand-up, and thinks she will do another book, but still, she loves taking her shows on the road, meeting people with differing views, taking them all in.
“We live in this social media bubble and then something [like Brexit] happens and the Left went, ‘What, not everyone thinks like me?’
“What did you expect? You’ve called people evil because they have different concerns to you. There’s no way you can connect with those people now. Just step out of your comfort zone and engage.”
I reckon it is this passion for connecting that makes her a natural novelist.
“That’s why I love being a standup,” she explains. “I go to a place where I know the audience will be so Tory, so Right-wing. And I will find a common ground with them. I might not change their minds. I’m not there to. But we will get on, and it gives me faith in being human.”
‘I had huge crushes on girls when I was 17, but I didn’t know what to do about it’ ‘Is Joanna Lumley Indian? Is Boris American? Is Eddie Izzard Yemeni?’