When the book was finally published, my father was upset about one thing. “You should have used our last name,” he complained. I reminded him that he was the reason I had not. “What did I know?” he said.

He and my mother spent the first month after publication going from bookstore to bookstore, just looking at the book. I made them promise, however, not to accost any shoppers.

For my book tour, I invited my parents to come to Northern California to hear me at my local bookstore. “I will come under one condition,” my father said. “Do not introduce us.”

The entire day before my book signing, my father reminded me that they did not want to be introduced under any circumstances. “Don’t worry,” I said, “the evening is about me.”

Ten minutes before getting into the car, my mother said, “I want to be introduced.”

“Forget it,” I said.

Over two hundred people showed up for the reading. My parents sat in the fourth row. When the store manager introduced me, I glanced at my mother. She was already crying. I never once looked at my father for fear that I would start laughing and never stop.

After the reading, someone in the audience asked me how my parents feel about the book. They loved it, I said, and were in fact in the audience, but did not want to be introduced. “So if you see a man old enough to be my father who looks just like me, it’s a coincidence,” I added.

When the event was over, a crowd gathered around my parents. I could hear my father holding court: “I am going to sue hare! I am going to sue hare!”

On the way home, my mother said that was the best night of her life. My father said he wanted Steve Martin to play him in the movie.

When my father found out that I was writing one last story for the paperback, he insisted I add an explanation. He said, “When I went on Bowling for Dollars, every contestant had brought his own bowling ball, except for me. I had to use someone else’s and it was much too heavy. That’s why I bowled so poorly.”

“That’s okay,” I told him. “I won the jackpot with that story.”

About the Author

FIROOZEH DUMAS graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She lives with her husband and children in Northern California. Please visit her online at www.firoozehdumas.com.

Copyright Page

2004 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright © 2003 by Firoozeh Dumas

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade
Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dumas, Firoozeh.
Funny in Farsi : a memoir of growing up Iranian in America / Firoozeh Dumas.
p. cm.