Growing up Valley
Pop culture, queerness and the immigrant experience intertwine in Khashayar J. Khabushani's debut novel
Khashayar J. Khabushani was in his mid-20s when he knew he had a story to tell. At the time, the author of “I Will Greet the Sun Again” was teaching in Pacoima and realized that while he was growing up, there were certain events in his life that he would narrate to himself.
“They were so meaningful to me that, as a young person, I would narrate them to myself as they were happening,” Khabushani says on a recent phone call from San Francisco, where he currently lives. “Now I realize that as a way to make sense and make meaning of it.”
“I Will Greet the Sun Again,” out this month, is a coming-of-age novel set primarily in the San Fernando Valley during the 1990s and early 2000s. It's fiction but, as the author notes, it does draw from his own experiences. In it, the narrator, K., navigates life from late childhood, when he is briefly uprooted to Iran, through his teens back in the Valley. It's a story about family, trauma and coming to understand one's own identity.
“I really wanted to find a way to revisit that young person's voice that's inside of me and find a way to put it on the page,” Khabushani explains, “because it feels like a very compelling story, not just that I want to read but that I feel other people like me, or in circumstances like me, could find a lot of value in.”
Khabushani hadn't intended to be a writer. “I didn't grow up reading or writing, didn't grow up around literary folks,” he says. “The reason I say that is that the more I do this, the more I work on writing, the more I realize how important it is to be around other voices and to read. At least, I think that is one sure way of developing one's own voice.”
Since Khabushani came to writing a little later in life, there was a learning curve in creating his novel. “In many ways, it really felt like learning language, actually learning language for the first time,” he says.
Among the details that stand out are Khabushani's descriptions of the western portion of the Valley where he was raised around the turn of the 21st century. “I probably will never get over the fact of being a young person in the Valley in the '90s, early 2000s, where, to me, it seemed that there was nothing that was happening and yet everything was happening,” he says. “That kind of contrast is so bizarre to me.”
Khabushani goes on to describe “the deep parts of the Valley” — “the sprawling streets, the strip malls, the liquor stores, the tire shops, again, the nothingness” — in contrast to coming-of-age stories set in locales known for their creative scenes and LGBTQ+ communities.
“It's not exactly like coming of age in the East Village or San Francisco, where — at least for me, as queer or as an artist who is coming of age — you have the context of these places,” he says. “For me, I felt like that's something this narrator didn't have in the Valley and, yet, that doesn't mean that there isn't still value in the environment that he's growing up in.”
Khabushani also digs into the pop culture of the era, reflecting on the music of System of a Down and devoting a good chunk of space to basketball, especially the Lakers. He grew up playing the sport and is a Lakers fan with a particular fondness for the period when Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant were teammates.
“I remember the first time Kobe and (Michael) Jordan went up against each other. My eldest brother was a huge Jordan fan. I remember it was so exciting seeing this young kid out of high school going up against arguably the greatest player of all time,” Khabushani recalls. “It really started from there and following his trajectory and the Lakers trajectory and they bring in the Bulls' former coach, Phil Jackson, and they go on this incredible run.”
He recalls watching games in the early 2000s when the television set became a “portal into a magical place,” where you could catch a glimpse of stars like Jack Nicholson cheering on the team as well, and Khabushani injects that kind of youthful excitement into the story.
He admits to feeling a bit “terrified” about the publication of his debut novel. “I spent a lot of time with the emotions and the events that happen in the book where I think this terror is the way in which the story is told,” he says. Khabushani adds that, with the coming-of-age novels that he loves, the narrator tells the story with a sense of reflection that comes with time.
That's not the case in “I Will Greet the Sun Again.”
“For this particular work, there isn't that distance,” he notes. “The reader experiences things as the narrator experiences them.”