Writing in Solitude: Thoughts on
My Prison,
My Home

My Prison, My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran
By Haleh Esfandiari
Publisher: HarperCollins

Yesterday morning, while getting ready for school, I was listening to Susan Page interview an Iranian-American woman named Haleh Esfandiari on the Diane Rehm Show. In 2007, Esfandiari went to Tehran to visit her Mother. As she was headed to the airport to go home, she was robbed and her passports were taken. Esfandiari could not leave the country. When she then applied for new passports, the Iranian authorities became suspicious. They subjected her to long interrogations, and eventually, she was put into solitary confinement at Evin Prison for nearly four months. Esfandiari has written a book about her ordeal titled “My Prison, My Home,” and it was released today.

In the interview, Esfandiari spoke of her first thoughts upon entering into solitary confinement. “When they put me into Evin,” she said, “and they took me to that cell and closed the iron door behind me, and I heard the door being locked. I looked around, and I said, ‘this is going to be my home for the next God knows how long, but it’s also my prison.’”

Esfandiari recalled telling herself constantly that they could take away her freedom, but they couldn’t take away her past. “That gave me a lot of courage,” she said.

The most interesting thing I gleaned from listening to the interview was not the horrific ordeal of being robbed, interrogated for hours, and forced into solitary confinement, but instead was Esfandiari’s response to it all. She told how she spent seven to eight hours each day exercising and walking in her cell to keep her spirits from falling into deep despair. While she walked, she wrote two books in her head. One book was a children’s story for her grandchildren, the other was about her paternal grandmother.

“She was a woman who had a lot of influence on me,” Esfandiari said of her grandmother,” so I wrote her biography in my mind. I would move chapters, paragraphs, edit and do all these things, which was quite time consuming.”

As a writer, I try to imagine having enough solitude to write and edit a book completely in my head. It’s difficult to comprehend in today’s environment with our cell phones, blackberries, families, computers, Twitter, Facebook, and television. When I finally became serious about my writing, I knew I had to find some way to find or create some solitude. At home, I’ve changed an upstairs bedroom into a personal office where I’m surrounded by my books and my thoughts. I sit at an old, but beloved desk that my late grandmother refurbished. And on days when I can no longer handle sitting at a desk, I move over to a comfy sofa chair I have placed in the corner. A far cry from a prison cell, to be sure.

In the last two weeks, my life has been in total upheaval, as I went back to school to finish my last year of college. Many things seem out of my control right now, and solitude is difficult to come by—especially when I cannot be at home typing away in my office. But then, I think about Esfandiari, and I am reminded how she made the best out of her circumstances and events that were beyond her control. Inspired by her, I’m now trying to do the same. Yesterday, when I had a spare moment in between classes, I stole away to a quiet corner where I could hear my thoughts and quickly scribble them down. I’m not quite up to writing and editing in my head just yet, but it’s a start.

I’m excited to read and review this book on WinterWrite. It has been added to my reading list. Until then, I’d love to read your comments.

Where is your favorite place to write? Do you like to write in long stretches or a little bit here and there?