I didn’t ask Kaveh Taherian for his blessing until five years after I settled on using his name (which indirectly resulted in a podcast about musical theater, but that’s an acknowledgment for another time). And while I never expected for him to give me any more than that, Kaveh became an invaluable resource throughout the entire writing process by acting as my “Persian consultant,” responding to my texts at all hours like, “Do Persians do the ‘no shoes in house’ thing?” (“absofuckinglutely”) and “Do you text your mom in Farsi or English?” (“both”). All of the Mazandarani family’s Farsi/Farglish lines were translated, and often suggested, by him, as were many of the Persian in-jokes. And when none of the actors who auditioned for the audiobook narrator of Kaveh’s chapters were quite clicking, in the end it would be Kaveh Taherian who would give Kaveh Mazandarani his voice.

But more important to me, in the last couple of years he has grown from a distant colleague to my good friend. At times I am very much his Nikola, the Phantom to his Persian, the agent of chaos to his voice of sanity, and there are few perspectives I trust more than his. There is little from the fictional Kaveh’s life or backstory that was influenced by the real one (he is, to my knowledge, neither a Rhodes Scholar nor a cradle robber), but if Kaveh Mazandarani took anything from Kaveh Taherian, it was his good humor, his compassion, and his kindness. In the almost arbitrary decision of borrowing his name, I have rediscovered a friend that I have grown to treasure. I love you, Kaveh, even if you are wrong about Phantom.

About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lindsay Ellis is a New York Times bestselling author and video essayist on media, narrative, and film theory, and also co-writes and co-hosts the fiction-focused web series It’s Lit! for PBS Digital Studios. After studying Cinema Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she earned her MFA in Film and Television Production from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts with a focus in documentary and screenwriting. She lives in Long Beach, CA.

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