Mariam Rahmani ’10 Explores Romance and Self-Discovery in Debut Novel

The book: Liquid (Algonquin Books) follows an unnamed Iranian-Indian American narrator, who, confident in her intellect, finds herself struggling financially despite having earned a Ph.D. Frustrated, she turns to her childhood best friend Adam who jokingly suggests she “marry rich.” She launches a calculated plan: 100 dates and a proposal all by the fall. A whirlwind summer ensues, packed with a series of eccentric encounters from a trust fund babe socialist to a Porsche-owning producer. Soon, tragedy strikes in Tehran, and the narrator must reckon with new familial revelations. She begins to doubt her plan and soon realizes that maybe the perfect person has been in front of her this entire time. Rahmanin blends romance, loss, and satire into a witty and original book of self-discovery.

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The author: Mariam Rahmani ’10 earned her undergraduate degree from Princeton in Comparative Literature. Liquid is her debut novel. Rahmani’s various other essays have been published widely in Granta, New York Magazine, and People. As a writer and a translator, Liquid is in the process of being translated into Dutch and Croatian.

Excerpt:

Prologue

Friday, June 16, 2007

The night I was awarded my doctorate, I had sex with a stranger on the beach. It was easy to get there, to that point of false intimacy. I’d seen the script.

Pick the most attractive person at the bar. See that they’re unattached. In this case, a 20-something cisman crooked over his phone, bench-press-produced chest curling like paper. Order a drink without consulting the menu.

At a civilized bar like this, a whiskey sour — an egg-white sour requires a kind of quotidian violence, and violence is the sign of civilization.

Wait.

I sat, sipping my drink and studying the other women in the room. Women who’d gotten all dolled up on a Friday night for men or for each other but most of all, I chose to believe, for themselves. To feel the weight of your lashes cloaked in black, the pinch of no-stretch denim against your depilated thigh.

And just like that, he set his phone down and turned to me. “Come here often?” he asked. So we were sharing a script. Indeed, as time would soon tell, in the hours wedged between that predetermined line and our so-to-speak roll in the hay (i.e., sand), little about this man surprised me. But I surprised myself. My hunger for risk. (According to the rules of straight respectability, a first encounter should not end where I took it.) My interest in power. (Was it his or my own limits I wanted to test?) My modest shame. (It clung to me like the sand that stuck to my pubes for days, materializing on clean sheets and the wet shower floor.)

Now I reminded myself to smile. “Every now and again,” I said. In fact it was my first time. The place was way too pricey. “What about you?” I asked. “Almost every night. I work just around the corner, on Rose.” At the word “work” his chest broadened. He sat up straighter. Wrinkle-free athleisure and suspiciously white shoes: today’s version of the gray flannel suit.

My phone pinged. A text from Adam, offering to “brave” the Westside to take me out for a celebratory drink. He’d grown up in Venice, but now, like everything that breathed except me, lived much further east.

“What kind of work do you do?” I asked the guy. “Standard Silicon Beach,” he said. “But I’m a poet at heart.” Was he being ironic? Though I supposed it was no concern of mine if a bunch of softhearted white techies ran out the softhearted white hippies who’d run out whoever was here before that. And as for Adam, he only stood to profit — his mother still lived in the neighborhood, and she owned.

I turned my phone face down. “So what’re you trying to ‘disrupt’? Duvets?” “Not exactly,” he laughed. He talked, I listened. At some point he mentioned a motorcycle. What was the make of his bike? And oh wow, he’d fixed it up himself? — from there, my work was done. I said “yes” to another round, my drink joining his tab. Night was falling outside, clarifying our shared objective. I wrapped my fingers around the stem of my coupe.

I smiled on cue. If it weren’t for my boycut I would’ve flipped my hair. Fresh off a six-year Ph.D. and just five months into a presidency that had decided to define itself by a Muslim ban, I wanted, for just one night of my life, to coast.

He asked about the oysters that lay at the barman’s back in a glass case, on a bed of ice. He ordered a dozen of the kind that was described as “easy to shoot” plus two glasses of white. I didn’t care for oysters. All those wet and briny folds — the allusion was too obvious. But now I ate my fair share. Like the light fare my department had served after the hooding ceremony, it only left me hungrier.

My solace lay in the mediocrity of the wine, an oaked California chardonnay that was so buttery it could’ve used its own pairing to cut the fat. Any adult would have gone for “brightness” and “minerality”— I found myself reassessing our age gap. I’d half expected the barman to correct his order, before remembering that a man is seldom corrected, even less so in public and never when paying.

After a plate of kampachi crudo, plus fries and a bread basket; after another up-and-down to check he hadn’t misjudged my waist size; after the immense relief of a trip to the bathroom; and after the closing of the tabs — mine as light as the foam on that first sour, which through the sparkly tulle of my intoxication now seemed so far away — we left.

To the beach, for a stroll, like lovers do. Across Main, across Pacific, and into the maze of multimillion-dollar bungalows. Through a latch-gate into the courtyard of a weed shop. Onto the empty boardwalk and, kicking off my heels, into the sand. It was cold, and the air was colder. There wasn’t anyone around, outside of the tents pitched before the tide.

A few paces from the water we paused. He kissed me. There was nothing to be done, of course, but that.

I kissed him back. He kissed me again, harder, and I kissed him again, harder. He used tongue, I used tongue, he kissed my neck, I touched his fly, he touched my breasts, I lay down, he lay on top — the syntax of straight sex is straightforward; every book, every movie, every song and sleepover and bridal shower, every set of his&hers sinks and soaps and towels, conspired to teach you its grammar, and now I let this language do the work, dictating my body and his body, ridding us of the burden of meaning-making: Penetration.

Just then a camera flashed. Some sicko on the sidelines, watching from the darkness — but I guess if you had sex in public, you didn’t have the right to complain.

I stood and brushed the sand off my back. Shimmied down the hem of my skirt suit. Reclaimed my things. Bag, shoes, phone. At the edge of the road, I called a car. The guy left without a word. I’d proved myself no lady, and he’d tired of playing the gentleman. A pair of piercing brights announced my ride, and I checked the license plate before climbing in.

I scrolled through my phone on the way home to Mar Vista. My mother had emailed her congratulations in lieu of flying to LA for commencement. Never mind that I was her only child, or that she’d pressured me to do the Ph.D. in the first place; it was her policy never to apologize. My father had left a missed call from a +98 number, the Iranian country code the better excuse for being absent, but not by much. This was the right time, he suggested in a follow-up voice memo, to start thinking about marriage.

Ignoring my parents, I texted my friend Adam back, taking a rain check on the French 75. I didn’t tell him about my hookup.

I lay back against the headrest, spent. The Greek that Adam had tattooed on his bicep — a pale but admittedly sizeable canvas — genied before me:

γνῶθι σεαυτόν

“Know thyself,” the great Delphic command.

There had been a single hiccup in the sentence between me and the handsome stranger, an em dash in a comma’s place: he’d paused I reached to unbutton his jeans. Clearly I wasn’t the woman he thought I was, and this was not a woman’s place. To want sex with a stranger in public. To go cruising.

Only then did it occur to me, tucked safely in the back seat, that this man had what, six or seven inches, on me? And a solid 70 or 80 pounds; mostly muscle, by the look of his pecks. The slightest shift in power, and desire could’ve turned to mere consent, and consent was a hair’s breadth away from violence.

Know thyself. It seemed to me now that this, if anything, had been whispered in Eve’s ear at Eden, this had caused humanity’s fall. Each day on earth this edict drove us, self-knowledge an asymptote that only death would collapse.

Or maybe chlamydia. I set a reminder to stop by the health center for an STD screening in the morning. Now wasn’t exactly the best time to start teasing out the galaxy of selfhood, at least not its sexual frontiers. I only had health insurance for another week.

Excerpted from Liquid by Mariam Rahmani. Copyright © 2025 and published by Algonquin Books. Reprinted with permission of the editors.

Reviews:

“[A] smart, addictive debut novel.”  — Vanity Fair

"Brainy, swift, naughty, constantly surprising, and slyly political—a transgressive tour de force of cultural criticism, hidden inside a careening, and deftly comic, logic proof of love." — Heidi Julavits, author of Directions to Myself and The Vanishers