#8: Only This Beautiful Moment

 

We are no one if we don't carry our history in us.

Only This Beautiful Moment

Abdi Nazemian

 

Year Published: 2023

Pages: 394

Genres: YA fiction, LGBTQ fiction, historical fiction, contemporary realistic fiction

Topics: Immigrant families, LGBTQ identity, LGBTQ history, family bonds, history between Iran and America

Recognition

    Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Young Adult Literature, 2023
    Stonewall Book Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature, 2024

Summary

2019: Moud is a second-generation Iranian American teenager living in Los Angeles. Gay and out, with a steady boyfriend, he struggles to connect with his emotionally distant father, whom he feels disapproves of him. When Moud and his father fly to Tehran to visit the ailing family patriarch, Moud discovers that there's much more to the country's LGBTQ population—and his own family—than he ever imagined.

1978: Saeed is a university student in Tehran protesting Iran's corrupt regime and falling in love with a mysterious girl. After he's caught up in violence at a demonstration, Saeed's parents arrange for him to flee Iran for the United States, where he moves to Los Angeles to live with his grandmother, a white American woman whom Saeed never even knew existed.

1939: Bobby is a Los Angeles musician whose domineering stage mother dreams of him becoming a Hollywood star. Bobby is secretly in love with Vicente, his best friend and the only other brown boy on the school tennis team. When Bobby lands a contract with MGM, his new milieu introduces him to a world in which he starts to dream of loving openly and living freely.

The lives of these three boys connect to tell a multigenerational story about the complicated relationship between two countries and the even more complex love of family members struggling to accept each other despite their differences.

Only This Beautiful Moment and Me

I came across Only This Beautiful Moment when I was researcher recent award-winning YA books to read for this project. I saw that Nazemian's novel won the 2023 Lambda Literary Award, one of the premier awards of LGBTQ literature, and I thought the century-spanning nature of the story and its backdrop of U.S.-Iran relations and history sounded interesting.

Nazemian, himself a gay Iranian American, has said that he wrote the novel in part as a response to former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 2007 claim that "in Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in [the U.S.]." But rather than writing a simple screed against the oppressive Iranian government, Nazemian brings a great deal of depth to the exploration of ethnic and sexual identities in his novel. Moud, for instance, finds a strong sense of belonging and vitality in Tehran and its underground gay community that he finds lacking the vapid, Very Online culture he's used to in America. I was also struck by Nazemian's emphasis on family and the importance of maintaining connections even in the face of strained relationships and a lack of understanding. The text features more nuance in its treatment of intercultural and LGBTQ family relations than I honestly expected from a YA novel. It is maybe a little too long and drags some in the middle, and Nazemian relies a little too heavily on dialogue to develop the narrative and themes, but I would still definitely recommend Only This Beautiful Moment to anyone interested in a complex exploration of LGBTQ family relationships.

Only This Beautiful Moment covers a lot of ground, from 1930s Hollywood to revolutionary Iran and beyond. Reading the novel made me want to learn more about the long relationship between the United States and Iran, as well as the glamorous but often brutal oligopoly of the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and '40s.

Teaching Considerations

Young Adult: Only This Beautiful Moment offers a fairly mature exploration of themes of family relationships and sexuality. I probably wouldn't recommend the book to students younger than 11th or 12th grades (16-18 years old).

Whole Class, Small Group, or Independent Read: I think there are ways to approach Only This Beautiful Moment that could work in multiple reading environments, although I would lean more towards small group or independent reading. A whole-class read might be difficult because of the sexually explicit scenes, but the novel does raise many important questions about complex mixed identities and could be paired with other texts in which characters straddle multiple different worlds.

Persian Poetry Exploration: As explained in the text, poetry is very important in Iranian culture; the novel's title is even based on a poem by Rumi. Educators could use Persian poems by some of the poets mentioned in the novel (Rumi, Saadi, Hafez, Khayyam, Forough Farrokhzad) to explore Iranian/Persian culture further and draw connections between the poems and the novel's themes.

Sensitive Content: Only This Beautiful Moment contains some frank discussion of sexuality and a couple of explicit scenes of sexual activity. There is some profanity and a scene of bloody violence.

Read-Aloud Passages

• She pulls up to a quiet street and screeches her car to a halt  ...  no longer flirting with the object of his affection. (pp. 84-88)
• Moud's cousin Ava takes him to an underground party in Tehran, where he meets some queer Iranians and compares the superficial online culture he knows in America to the hidden but vital environment of the party. The passage is a direct response to the "there are no homosexuals in Iran" myth that Nazemian wants to counteract. It also represents an early stage in Moud's developing consciousness of his complex gay Iranian American identity.
  
  
• I see her. Her unmistakable ponytail.  ...  But he doesn't have the strength to say more. (pp. 133-136)
• Saeed is caught up in a violent protest while looking for the woman he's fallen in love with. Another protestor is shot and loses consciousness in his arms. It's probably the most visceral passage in the whole novel and would be a great read-aloud to spark students' interest.
  
  
• Mother and Willie are waiting for us in the living room  ...  "That's who I could've been. Babak Jafarzadeh." (pp. 348-353)
• Bobby confronts his mother and stepfather with the help of his mentor, Zip Lamb, who supports and defends Bobby after his parents learn that he's gay. He also learns a startling truth about his own past. This is an emotional scene and an important development for Bobby's character. The real star, though, is Zip, who is a powerful voice of reason and compassion against the explosive anger of Bobby's mother and stepfather.

Liked Only This Beautiful Moment? Try These:

• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (1956)
• Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian (2019)
• Ander & Santi Were Here by Jonny Garza Villa (2023)