A New Book Shows Sies Marjan’s Colors Haven’t Faded
Sies Marjan
“My mother was never a fan of my writing. She thought I was too emotional. She thought I was too sensitive. I was never that. I was never an angry person. I was certainly never a woman who was angry.” She paused. “So no, I don’t know why I felt anger.”
—Sies Marjan
Born and raised in Mexico City, Sies Marjan, the daughter of a Mexican mother and an Egyptian father, has been writing, acting in the theater, and directing documentaries for the past two decades. In the 1990s she was in several well-received plays, some of them directed by her father. “We were a strange family,” she says. “We were all very creative people, very artistic. It’s always about being the artist, right?”
However, as she grew older, her anger toward her parents faded.
“My mother was never a fan of my writing,” says Sies Marjan, who was just 20 in 1994 when she completed her debut novel, The Book of My Mother, a love story about lost love and redemption as it was portrayed in four different books. “She thought I was too emotional. She thought I was too sensitive. I was never that. I was never an angry person. I was certainly never a woman who was angry.”
Sies Marjan says that her writing has always come from a place of love, and that the emotional aspect of it may have been secondary to the personal experience that she wanted to relay.“It’s definitely not something I try to sell on my career path,” she says. “Maybe some of my characters have it in them. Maybe, because I am a person who can be both, that’s how I became this writer, and maybe that’s how I have the ability to express my most beautiful side.”
Sies Marjan now lives in Paris with her American husband, a photographer, and their two children. She is the author of the novels The Book of My Mother, A Different Color, and The Day of the Blackbird, which is a finalist for the 2016
