The first time Googoosh was asked to write a memoir, the request came from Iran’s Islamic Republic interrogators. Their goal was for the pop superstar to relay a “cautionary tale.” This, of course, did not sit right with the beloved diva who was the Olivia Newton-John of Iran’s music world until the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979 — and all female performers were banned from singing in public.
“I didn’t want to cooperate with them,” Googoosh tells me as she reflects on the sham memoir the agents tried to get her to write. “I hated to tell my story to them.” Decades after refusing to put her name on a government-sanctioned lie, Iran’s biggest pop star has finally broken her silence. Her new book, “Googoosh: A Sinful Voice,” was not a choice, she writes, but a “necessary duty.”
The lyrical story chronicles her life from birth to the present, including Googoosh’s four marriages and moments of joy and despair spent under decades of house arrest while Tehran was rocked by war. It’s shockingly candid, revealing multiple abortions, drug abuse (including her own) and chilling moments of suicidal ideation. “If people hate me when they read it, it’s OK. That was my life,” Googoosh says. She asserts she didn’t want to write something just to be pleasant. She also considers her home country tenderly, and in her book notes, “Iran is part of my being. You can take Googoosh out of Iran, but you can’t take Iran out of Googoosh.”
Faegheh “Googoosh” Atashin was born in 1950 in Tehran to parents who were Azerbaijani Iranians. Googoosh wasn’t even potty-trained when she began performing as a toddler at cabarets as orchestrated by her showman father. She was mostly self-taught, imitating other famous singers. Soon she was in films and by the ’70s she was Iran’s most famous pop export, performing on international stages alongside Ray Charles and Tina Turner. Her infectious vocals, whether upbeat disco bops or heartwrenching ballads, became imprinted on the national consciousness. Ultimately her career was cut short. She writes: “The revolution swept across my homeland like a raging storm, unraveling the delicate fabric of a world once interwoven with tradition, modernity, and poetry. Almost overnight, the shimmering parties, the premieres of daring boundary-pushing films, and the intoxicating rhythm of music and freedom were replaced by fear, uncertainty, and darkness.”
On a recent fall afternoon, I met with Googoosh and her co-writer, Tara Dehlavi, on Zoom. Googoosh appears as chic as ever with her signature honey-gold hair slicked to the side and impeccable Covergirl-worthy shimmery makeup that makes the 75-year-old look decades younger. Googoosh mentions many famous writers over the years have reached out wanting to work with her on a memoir, but Dehlavi is not a known writer; she’s instead a soft-spoken 39-year-old former clinical psychologist whose exile from Iran has placed her in France most of her life.
“I said let’s write it in English,” Dehlavi tells me. She adds the reason she wanted Googoosh to write her memoir was that so much of it was untold, including how at age 50 she made a miraculous comeback. “I proposed, let’s please share your story with the world … and future generations. Because there have been many documentaries made about you but nothing from you yourself,” Dehlavi says.
Googoosh places full responsibility for the memoir’s existence on Dehlavi. “With Tara, I opened my heart,” she says. “I was free to talk about myself.”
Since settling in the West in 2000 — first Canada, then Los Angeles where she still resides — Googoosh has enjoyed multiple tours, including performances at the Hollywood Bowl, Madison Square Garden and the Sydney Opera House. Her fame is as solid as ever, thanks to a loyal diaspora full of fans old and new. Last spring, not only did she star in Ed Sheeran’s music video “Azizam” (she appears in the final seconds, where Sheeran is launched from the endless festivities of his Persiophile fever dream back into the recording studio. There, Googoosh tells him in Persian, ‘Azizam, let’s go write a hit song, hurry up!’), the song was released a week later with her vocals for a Persian version. Like everything she touches, it was a huge hit.
Googoosh admits her star has not yet dimmed, not even in her 70s. “For 21 years they closed the bottle, and all of a sudden, the bottle is opened and [out] I popped!” Googoosh says with her signature smile as one of her beloved Pomeranians pops up on her lap.
It turns out Dehlavi was the perfect person to have asked her to chronicle her life — and perhaps the only one who could have gotten that eventual yes. “Actually her mom is my very best friend from when she was 13 years old,” Googoosh says. “They are a part of my family.”
Dehlavi did not expect to be a key part of the team, a project that would essentially encompass the whole of her 30s, but it’s clear this would not have gotten done without her. “There were times where I jokingly felt I was worse than the interrogators in Evin [Prison],” she says. “But I just wanted to be the project manager on this. … I just got scared if we found a ghostwriter, her voice would get lost in translation and so I got more and more protective of that voice. I was just like a bodyguard — I can’t just let anyone take Googoosh’s voice as the narrator.”
As a protector of Googoosh’s story, she recalls double-checking if the star really wanted to share some more revealing anecdotes. “She was like, ‘We’re either going to write this memoir or we’re not,’” Dehlavi says. “Just like in her art, where she goes all in, and feels the lyrics, the words, the music, it was the same with this book. She was like — I either speak or I stay quiet and I don’t write this.”
In their decade of drafting, Dehlavi and Googoosh wrote two other versions of the book until they got to this one — the version that finally felt right.
The result is a memoir that is poignant without being distractingly ornate. Chronological chapters are interspersed with glimpses into Googoosh’s horrific time incarcerated in an Islamic Revolutionary Court makeshift prison, where she was among detainees who at times looked to her legacy, and songs, for light amongst the turmoil. The book operates in a similar way as we journey to what we know is a happy ending — Googoosh getting her voice back to not just sing again but to tell us this long-awaited story.
“I was thinking my story was not important for people, especially for foreigners,” Googoosh shares with me. “But I was wrong.”
One of the most moving parts of the book is how it ends, with the specter of a protest slogan linked with Iranian women’s rights activism, “Woman,Life, Freedom,” alluded to, adding to the noble grandeur and potent ambition you somehow sense throughout the project. Dehlavi agrees. “I think both Googoosh and I through her story and through her memories knew that inevitably it would shine light on the struggle of women in Iran,” she says.
In the final pages, Googoosh notes that women in Iran are currently not allowed to record music or sing solo in front of a male audience. She writes with the same aching longing you hear in her ballads, the acknowledgement of pain, but the steadfast belief in something bigger and better — in this case, her “hope that my story can break down the silence that surrounds my people’s plight, especially our women. I pray that very soon, they, too, will have reclaimed their voices.”
Khakpour was born in Iran and raised in Greater Los Angeles. She is the author of five books, including most recently, “Tehrangeles.”
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