Desiree Akhavan is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and actress. Her film and television projects include Appropriate Behavior, The Miseducation of Cameron Post (winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance), and The Bisexual on Hulu. The child of Iranian immigrants who fled the revolution, she grew up as an outsider at a New York City private school, where she was voted “The Beast” by her classmates. She spent much of her adolescence grappling with body issues as a woman who didn’t conform to Iranian ideals for beauty and sexuality. In college, she engaged in self-harm and struggled with an eating disorder. After a particularly difficult breakup, her parents convinced her to get a nose job, hoping it would fix her problems.
She recently released You’re Embarrassing Yourself: Stories of Love, Lust, and Movies (Penguin Random House, 2024), a tragically comic memoir-in-essays, chronicling the author’s most humiliating moments on her journey from adolescent outcast to indie filmmaker.
I recently spoke with Akhavan via Zoom about her memoir, the shame that shaped her voice, and how being a writer for film is different from writing your own story.
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The Rumpus: What made you want to write a memoir?
Desiree Akhavan: I had these stories that didn’t necessarily make sense for film, and I’d been writing in script format my whole life. I felt like these tales of girlhood made the most sense in memoir form, so that’s sort of the genesis of it. It all began with this story about “The Beast.” That chapter started the whole project.
Rumpus: A lot of the collection is about the idea of shame. How did that theme emerge?
Akhavan: I wanted to do my own version of “Traumarama”—a column in Seventeen Magazine that I loved as a kid—the only place where I could relate to anything. I felt for these girls who wrote into the magazine with the most humiliating moments of their life, like: “Someone mistook my tampon string for a thread and pulled it out.” It’s the horrible, cringe-inducing moments that are so human. I love films that are in that vein too, like Todd Solondz movies or Muriel’s Wedding. Stories of misfits, stories of humiliation. Humiliation, but funny, in the face of coming-of-age. That period of your life where you’re trying to identify who you are and where you belong.
Rumpus: Did you identify with those films when you were younger, or did you relate when you were looking back?
Akhavan: It was real-time. I one hundred percent identified with Dawn Wiener [from Solondz’s iconic film Welcome to the Dollhouse] when I was Dawn Wiener’s age.
Rumpus: When did you write these essays?
Akhavan: It was over the course of years, in between various film and television projects. I really started putting pen to paper in earnest, years after the project had begun. I had written about my nose job and being voted “The Beast” in high school when I started this project, in 2015. Then I put it aside for years when I made The Misadventures of Cameron Post and The Bisexual. In 2019, those projects ended, and I started to think, “Okay, what’s the shape of this? Where is it going to take me?” It became clear that some of the coming-of-age moments lasted over the course of my twenties and thirties, and once I got to the meat of it, I realized there was a whole second puberty at the end of my thirties and a real recalibration of what my voice is and how I identify. I built one life in response to being a dorky kid, and another life in response to not quite finding a place—or I’ll say, finding a place for myself in the film industry and not quite liking it.
Rumpus: You wrote your memoir as a collection of essays, weaving tales about your relationships through the stories about your development as a filmmaker. Every time you figured something out, there was a new beginning, a new challenge. Winning Sundance could have been the ending, but you had to pitch yourself in Hollywood after this. You said you wanted to make history. What was it like to grapple with these expectations?
Akhavan: Yeah, I thought premiering my first film at Sundance would be an ending. I imagined that from then on life would feel set, and instead, it opened up. I think this is for all people—no matter where they’re at—no matter what they’re doing. It’s like you accomplish a certain goal, and a whole new set of questions arise. It was so naive of me to not realize that. You know your dream can come true, and then life continues. Finding a way to hold onto your identity, your voice, and your point of view as a filmmaker—I didn’t realize what a fight that would be.
Rumpus: Can you elaborate on that fight to keep your point of view?
Akhavan: I was doing press for a long time, when I had two projects coming out simultaneously. The question that kept arising was, “Where’s your Marvel film?” And at the time it was like 2018, early 2019, and I remember Cathy Yan had just become attached to Birds of Prey. I was suddenly [thinking], “Yeah, where is my Marvel film?” Never asking if I wanted to make a Marvel film—I didn’t even go to Marvel films—it’s not my vibe, not my jam. I got swept up in the hype of what it meant to be a success. That’s one small example. Just listening to other people’s opinions, and to the noise, as opposed to honing in on, “What’s the conversation you want to be having? What drove you to this work in the first place? How do you want to keep chasing it?”
Rumpus: Did you feel pressure to make certain films?
Akhavan: I think a lot of the people I met in Hollywood were eager to find a very commercial way to utilize my skill set, and I don’t begrudge them that, but I don’t think it was a great fit. Especially after The Miseducation of Cameron Post came out, there were a lot of altruistic issues movies that had a similar “marginalized-girl-gets-victimized” arc. I was never particularly interested in that genre. I happened to love that book and that story, and it spoke to me. But I understand the nature of the business and how people monetize filmmakers. All industries have formulas, and there was a time when I became obsessed with how to fit into that formula. I had to get over it, because I think some people do it naturally, but I got stuck in terms of my own creative output.
Rumpus: Many of the essays in this book are about identity in adolescence. Did any of those issues inform your experience as a filmmaker?
Akhavan: I think I got here as a response to the way I was seen as a kid. I was seen as dorky, or ugly or weird, and I became really obsessed with reclaiming that. I wanted to be in control. I wanted to shape my own narrative as opposed to feeling so invisible and inconsequential. I wanted to feel consequential, but once I was in that position, I was surprised by how unsatisfying it felt—how it didn’t fill me.
Rumpus: Do you feel settled about wanting to work within a certain construct or identity?
Akhavan: Well, I’ll just say that trying to navigate this industry made me doubt my impulses, which is why I’ve been working as a television director for hire. I had been writing and rewriting the same script for a long time, and a lot of voices infiltrated my brain, like, “Well, is this the right tone? Is this commercial enough? I think I entered a really long period of self-doubt, which I think finishing this book has helped me exit. Getting older has helped as well. I’m turning forty this year, and these years of confusion have helped me hone in on what I want to say and who I am, moving forward, which isn’t the same person I was when I was making Appropriate Behavior. I think everyone changes. I feel a lot more steadfast in who I am and what I make.
Rumpus: What did you learn through the process of writing this memoir?
Akhavan: I think we have the story we tell ourselves about the memories, and then, when you rewrite them, you can begin to see them from another point of view. I realized that my parents were in some ways responsible for my ambition and discipline. I had always seen myself as someone who had let my family down, and writing this book helped change that narrative for me.
I saw that my relationship to this work was in some ways toxic. It’s a good question. It helped me track what girlhood into womanhood has looked like for me and have a sense of the ways in which I think it’ll change moving forward. But it was important to me to have a document of that journey, because it felt so different from everyone else’s—being Middle Eastern in America. Being queer or, in particular, bisexual. Being a filmmaker who focuses in autofiction, there is a messy gray area that I occupy, which I haven’t seen in memoir or very much on screen, and it was exciting to get this out because this was the book I could have really used in my twenties.
Rumpus: Is that what drew you to autofiction?
Akhavan: I think loneliness brought me to autofiction. I wanted to show people I exist. This is my account. I was feeling isolated because I couldn’t see stories like mine, especially stories about marginalized communities. Those characters were always so altruistic, everything about them like they were martyrs—either victims or the butt of the joke. And I wasn’t interested in those narratives. I wanted to explore what it was to be human and flawed and funny and weird. It felt disingenuous to cast someone else to do an impression of me. It felt immediate and earnest. But I feel like this book is me closing the chapter on a lot of that. I’m ready to move on. The next projects I’m making don’t involve me as an inspiration or an actor, so I think it was a phase of my life I had to go through, and this book is sort of like the final word, unless I have a late in life Sex and the City–style episodic story—me in my sixties. I would love to watch a show about a bunch of sixty-year-olds being sluts. But my days of autofiction might be numbered.
Rumpus: Did your experience in writing autofiction make it easier to write a memoir, or were you terrified?
Akhavan: It’s definitely terrifying because autofiction is still fiction. [When you are writing a film script,] many other hands touch it. It begins in an honest place, but then you share it with a writing partner, you share it with producers, you share it with actors, and everyone lends their thumbprint. With a book, it’s just you, and it’s what you’re claiming is the truth, which is one hundred percent terrifying. It was a very different experience, and I’m far more vulnerable than I’ve ever experienced.
Rumpus: Were there any essays in this collection that were harder to write than others?
Akhavan: They were all hard, in terms of exposure. I can’t think of one that doesn’t feel deeply revealing and compromising in some way. But at the end of the day, they all felt important. There’s nothing in there that I’m ashamed of, but there were times when I was reading the audio book that I struggled. It was especially hard to read the chapter about my time at an eating disorder facility. That’s something that I’ve never spoken about openly, like my behaviors around bulimia and how disgusting they were. It felt important to write about it in an honest way. I’m glad that I did. But when I was reading it, I was like, “Yikes! This is hard to say out loud.” It was a lot easier to write than to read.
Rumpus: You write these essays about trauma with humor. Was it hard to find that voice, or did it come naturally?
Akhavan: It came pretty naturally, though I wondered what would be compelling for other people. In the beginning, I worried, “Am I just publishing a diary? At what stage is this entertaining?” The journey of writing this book was figuring out like, “Okay, I think these stories from my life could speak to other people.”
Rumpus: Did the concept change as you were writing it?
Akhavan: Yeah, when I first wrote it, it was supposed to be a guide for misfits. “Look what a dork I was, and how glamorous I became!” I sold this book right after I made Appropriate Behavior. I was approached to write it. For the first time in my life, the narrative was, “Look how cool this girl is!” I [thought], “Yeah, the story is I was a massive loser, and then I became a celebrated filmmaker. How cool is that?” I can talk about how dorky I was and what I did to climb my way here, and then life happened. Instead of writing the book, I kept making movies, and I kept living, and I won Sundance. I made a TV show, and I watched the persona that I built overtake me and lead me into a lot of self-doubt and confusion. Then, it became the story of continued search for identity, and how getting what you want isn’t necessarily going to fix you or heal you.
Rumpus: Were there any essays that didn’t make it into this collection?
Akhavan: I struggled to write about falling in love. Maybe it was too personal. I wrote a lot about heartbreak, but I tried to write about love, and it was difficult. And maybe that’s because I’m single now. Every time I wrote about falling in love, the relationship would sour, and I would feel weird about it. I had written a chapter about being a live-in nanny to billionaires from the Middle East. Those stories didn’t necessarily fit. You try them out, and sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. The last chapter, about freezing my eggs, I wrote recently. That one didn’t go through a lot of drafts. I didn’t live with that for a very long time. It was immediate, and it just made sense, for where the book was ending, and it was just a happy accident.
Rumpus: You mentioned Cat Power as the soundtrack of your mood, pre-nose job. What else is on the soundtrack of your adolescence?
Akhavan: My adolescence is a lot of Fiona Apple and Radiohead, for sure. I mean, it’s so sad. All these artists are really depressing. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem. That’s the shit I came of age with.
Rumpus: What projects are you working on now?
Akhavan: I’m in production on a new show for Amazon and A24 called Overcompensating. I have two scriptsthat hopefully will go into production inshallah back-to-back. One is a Farsi language film that takes place during the Islamic Revolution, which I’m making with BBC Films, and we’re also in the middle of writing a lesbian romantic comedy for Big Beach and Michael Clark, who produced Cameron Post.
The films couldn’t be more different. I think that’s what’s exciting. Whenever I took meetings in Hollywood, it was sort of this idea: “Whose career do you want?” That’s a fair question, but I could never think of somebody whose career I wanted. I am attracted to many different voices. My voice doesn’t fall neatly into a category. I want to make this Farsi language drama that takes place during a revolution in the late seventies and in a completely different world than anything I’ve ever made. I want to make a glossy Nora Ephron–style rom-com. These two worlds have no intersection. I am the intersection.
I think that’s the thing that is exciting to me. When I was younger, I wished that I could be like someone else and find a way to push my taste and my personality into a new version of whichever successful director—the new Ang Lee or the new Tim Burton—but I’m not that. Getting older has helped me whittle down what I am. I can carve out a space for myself as opposed to begging the powers that be to try to find a home for me. I think at the heart of it, the book is a story about looking for a home—looking for where you belong—and I think at this point in my life, and by the end of the book, I realized I had to create it myself. Nobody else is going to present it for me. That has been the ultimate journey.
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Author photograph by Cecilia Frugiuele
