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| Atash Yaghmaian (photo: Ori Dubow) |
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Atash Yaghmaian's My Name Means Fire (Beacon Press, October 14, 2025) is a haunting memoir of coming-of-age amid historical turbulence and horrific personal trauma. As a child in Iran, Yaghmaian lived through the Iranian Revolution, then the Iran-Iraq War, but home--where she endured verbal, physical, and sexual assaults--proved significantly more perilous. To stay alive, she left reality and moved into multiple selves. Her impassioned memoir recounts how that fluid ability to disassociate saved her life.
Your memoir takes readers from your precarious childhood in Iran to your solo arrival in New York at age 19. You're incredibly open about your dissociative identity disorder. When and how did the official diagnosis come about? And what was your reaction? Has that initial reaction evolved in the years since?
My first diagnosis with DID happened when I was 18, in Iran, after a suicide attempt. I had the good fortune to be seen by a really kind doctor who noticed my amnesia and correctly saw that it was a protective mechanism. At first, when he used the term "multiple personalities," I was frightened, because in Iran, saying someone has multiple personalities is often used to insult them. But he was kind and generous, and it planted a seed in me that, many years later, would sprout in wanting to understand my condition instead of run from it. Later, in the U.S., I was also misdiagnosed many times: depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia. It was only when I met my therapist Nancy, many years later, that she helped me accept my own condition.
In a previous exchange about doing this q&a, you used this phrase: "so that all my parts can understand what's happening." Could you explicate further? Might I ask who is answering these questions?
All of me is answering these questions! The nice thing about doing an interview by text is that it gives all parts of me a chance to reflect and answer each question. If it were a live interview on camera with a time pressure, the part that hears the question would probably be the one that answers. Either way, my parts trust that whoever needs to come out will give an answer that we're all okay with. We've worked on this for many years.
When did you decide you would write this book and so candidly share your difficult survival with strangers? What prompted this determination?
When I came to the U.S., I brought with me the mystery of my own condition. In order to make sense of my reality and things I forgot, I kept a journal. By doing that, I started to see the magic in writing: not only to make sense of my days, but to witness different parts of me on the page. Any time I shared my story with people, they would say, "You should write a book." So I decided to start writing a memoir, but at first, I didn't put any pressure on myself to publish it. That gave me the strength to really tell the truth. I also started taking memoir-writing classes at that point.
How did you approach the actual process of writing, particularly in welcoming/inviting all your different selves to contribute?
There were nine parts of me that wrote the book, even though now we are 13. At first, we were only telling the story of our outer world--the girl who grew up in Iran, experienced war, revolution, ritual abuse, and incest. Eventually, we were able to come up with a coherent narrative. But still something was missing. We hadn't really gotten to the truth of how we survived. The answer was: because of our multiplicity. So it was necessary to include our inner world and listen to more parts, even when it made the narrative more complicated. This is why the whole process took more than a decade.
You left behind many relationships when you came to the U.S. Your mother, who likely suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, looms large throughout your book. Have you somehow made peace with your relationship with her?
I have made peace with the fact that there is not much change likely to happen in that relationship. My mother hasn't been interested in growing with me, but I'm grateful for the life she has given me.
How do you balance an active therapy practice of your own with your writerly self? How does helping others face/address/recover from trauma affect your understanding of your past selves?
The good thing about being multiple is that we have a lot of energy! If one of us gets tired, another part can step forward. So even after seeing a lot of clients, the parts of me that like to write still have the stamina to do that. Helping people--even when they are in a lot of distress--always makes me feel rejuvenated. Also, by learning to validate other people's pain, we came to have an easier time validating our own.
You end the memoir with a letter addressed to "Dear Parts of Mine I Have Not Yet Met." Since completing the process of creating this book, other "parts" have emerged. What more did you discover about your selves in remembering and freeing your/their past?
Four more parts have come forward since we finished the book: Pink, Lilac, Purple, and Four. In the beginning of my journey, the parts that arrived usually carried a memory of something very painful from the past, such as my abuse or experiences with violence. But lately, the parts that have been arriving tend to carry more of a wish to live a fuller life. Pink, for example, really wants us to be dancing, so we've been doing that a lot! Lilac really wanted us to stop working at our high-stress job, so we quit it! Purple likes to work out. But more shall be revealed as they start to share their memories more. It takes time, and we don't put pressure on parts to speak prematurely.
Do you have any expectations from your readers-to-be?
I want my readers to come to my book with open hearts and open minds, and to try to identify with the feelings rather than comparing the details of their stories to mine.
Your epilogue briefly shares some of what happened post-U.S. arrival, to eventually being settled in a NYC psychotherapist's office. You also add, "There's another book to write." Might we expect a sequel soon?
Yes, expect a sequel! I'm working on it as we speak. The next book will be about the years I spent in the U.S. as an undocumented and sometimes homeless immigrant. The book will still be about DID, since in those years I still didn't completely understand my condition. But instead of my parts telling separate stories in separate chapters, they start communicating with each other within the same narrative. --Terry Hong