Behdad Esfahbod Writing

Read together, these pieces form a memoir assembled out of loose objects: a pipe, a sandwich, a watch, a car, a cup of coffee, a record player, a broken floppy drive. Each becomes a handle for pulling a person, a city, or a whole period back into view. The stories set out from a father’s print shop and all-night hacks at Sharif, then pass through cafés, kitchens, highways, airports, border crossings, and an interrogation cell. Along the way, love arrives late, friends become legends, machines refuse to cooperate, homes are made and lost, and food keeps everyone at the table a little longer.

The same stubborn question runs through it all: how does this thing work—and when it doesn’t, why? It is asked of software and scripts, but also of governments, relationships, memory, illness, and the self. Across Persian and English, memoir, poetry, travelogue, translation, satire, and technical folklore gradually reveal a larger arc: wordplay and longing; friendship, travel, and making things; surveillance, arrest, mania, and rupture; then identity, recovery, aging, and home. The result is candid, mischievous, sometimes bruising, and unexpectedly tender: a life debugged in public, one story at a time.