Q&A With Rebecca Morrison 

Rebecca Morrison is an author and essayist whom I have the pleasure of interviewing! Rebecca’s novel is The Blue Dress. Rebecca’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Newsweek, The Independent and HuffPost, among others. 

Q: Welcome to Book Notions Rebecca! Would you please give a brief description of The Blue Dress & discuss where the idea came from?  

A: The Blue Dress is a coming-of-age story based on my childhood about body image, a strained mother-daughter relationship, and what it means to be an Iranian-American immigrant. The story is about thirteen-year-old Yasmin, who came to America from Iran a year and a half ago, and is trying to figure out her new life and homeland. She has a complicated and sometimes heartbreaking relationship with her mom who wants Yasmin to be thinner. She’s close friends with Carmen, whose family came from Mexico a few years ago. In her attempts to find belonging and feel seen, she makes some wrong decisions, the most dangerous of which involve disordered eating, but through a series of events finds help and a way to love and accept herself in her body and her new life.

Q: How long did it take you to write The Blue Dress? Why was now the right time to write & publish it?

A: It took me around a year to turn my childhood memories into a novel, and another year to work with my publisher on revisions. The core of the story is about the mother-daughter relationship, and the deep yearning to belong in America as an immigrant, most of which is based on my life. I used the same emotions of my memoir, mother-daughter tension, developing an eating disorder, struggle for belonging, but I moved pieces around, rearranged events, gave characters different dimensions. The timing was based on me finally having the courage to go after my writing dreams and tell this story I’d been wanting to share for decades. 

Q: What messages & emotions do you hope readers come away with after they finish reading the last page? 

A: I hope my book helps open a dialogue between parents and children about the hard topic of body image struggles and what it means to accept yourself. Also, I hope that Iranian girls who’ve never seen themselves or their culture in a book, will meet Yasmin and say, she’s like me, or that’s like my family. And also, those kids who don’t know anything about Iran or Persian culture and see their first image or entry point into that world will see we’re all the same and want the same things. The world is complicated, and so much of what we hear about Iran comes from the news. To be able to show this side of Persian culture and let kids see we all want to belong, be seen, and to have love from our parents and have close friendships. 

Q: Will the second book be a sequel to The Blue Dress? Or will your next book be a totally different story with new characters? 

A: The second book is a completely different story. It follows a sixteen-year-old girl in Iran in 1979 who falls in love with a boy from a different world than hers. The revolution and a series of other tragedies force her and her family to leave Iran and move to San Francisco. The story goes through the next forty years of her life. At its center is a complicated, painful mother-daughter relationship shaped by their past in Iran. There is estrangement, grief, love and healing both for herself and for the people in her life.

Q: How does it feel knowing Kirkus gave The Blue Dress a glowing review calling the novel A raw and vulnerable exploration of widely relevant and resonant themes? Also congratulations are in order! 

A: Thank you! It’s such an honor and a thrill. It’s hard to hope for these kinds of reviews when you’re writing. You just want to tell your story the best way you can. And then you wait years for your book to come out into the world. To know that people you respect see your work and find it meaningful is everything. 

Q: How does it feel having your essays featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Newsweek, The Independent and HuffPost? What is your advice for anyone wanting to submit their work in any of these publications? 

A: It’s been incredible seeing my writing and stories in these publications. My advice for anyone who wants to get their work in these places is study the craft, take classes, read the publications you want to get into, and then figure out who and where to send your work. I found the editors by digging into the publication websites and doing google searches to find their email addresses. I think you must have delusional confidence, I certainly did, and believe you belong in that world. Don’t be discouraged by silence and rejections, that’s just part of the process. The more you write, the more it will help you find your writing voice and show you which stories resonated most with you and your readers.

Q: If/When The Blue Dress gets adapted by Hollywood, who would be your dream cast to play the characters you created? 

A: If it were ever made into a film, I would hope they cast Iranian-American actors. There’s an actress in the new reboot of Scrubs, Layla Mohammadi, who’d be wonderful as the mother in my story. The mom is a complex character that we judge harshly at first but then empathize and maybe even root for at the end. This might sound a little out of left field, but I’d want Jacob Tierney, the director of Heated Rivalry to do the movie. I love the way he handles the tension of a crush. When you’re thirteen, those feelings are enormous. I think he would do such a beautiful job capturing Yasmin’s experiences, some of which are so dark, painful, and full of shame. Even though that show was made for adults, so much of it is about emotional intensity. And that fits so well with the feelings of adolescence, the angst, the longing, the rivalry, the pain, the feeling that everything matters so much. He could bring Yasmin’s experience to life: her first serious conflict with her mom, first time she hurts her body with her eating disorder, first time being vilified for her ethnicity, her first crush and nemesis, all the big emotional stakes of trying to figure out who she is in a new world.