Sima B. Moussavian's Blog

Your book blends psychological trauma, paranormal elements, and mystery. What inspired you to bring these threads together into one story?

Reality, I guess. I think when traumatic experiences are triggered by a particular environment or event, then the unraveling that follows can thin out the line between reality and illusion. Apart from that, when wounds are reopened and lying raw, then we are more sensitive and with it more receptive. All of that, I think, opens us up to paranormal experiences. Or at least to experiences that we are forced to perceive or want to perceive as paranormal and mysterious.


The novel explores guilt, grief, and obsession in very intimate ways. Were any of these themes drawn from your own life or observations?:

I think every writer draws from their own life or observations, that's the point. I also think that grief and guilt can easily lead to obsessions of any kind, an unhealthy coping mechanism that ruins entire lives. And, yes, it is true that the exploration of these motives is very intimate in the book. I wanted this one to be deeply personal, I wanted it to hurt when I wrote it, I needed it to be raw. I am touching on all of my own traumas in it, because I wanted to be one of those authors who are brave enough to face themselves and put their entire soul and spirit into a book. The most touching stories ever written all have a deep intimacy and rawness in common, the feeling that you can taste the tears of whoever wrote them while you are reading them. That was what I was aiming for, and by God, did I cry.

You describe this as your first mystery novel, and that it’s based on real events. Could you share how much of the story is rooted in reality and how much is fictionalized?

The main storyline is honestly very close to what actually happened. I changed the timelines a bit, and adjusted the characters. They are obviously not real people but closely oriented on actual people I know or knew. I tried to intensify and deepen things like the love theme and also the paranormal parts of the novel, but all in all the story is closer to real life than it probably should be or will seem to readers.


Many passages feel deeply personal and almost confessional. Was writing this story a cathartic process for you?

You know what, I was actually just thinking about exactly this for a long time, because I realized that it truly was. I literally still start crying when I read certain parts of it, but not in a desperate way, it is more a deliberating kind of crying now, like I faced my deepest abyss and can now say goodbye to it and move on from it.


The relationships in the book are layered with longing, regret, and power struggles. How did you approach writing such complex emotional dynamics?

I think this was less a case of approaching them as an author and more a case of living through them as a person (laughs). Emotions in real life have never truly only one layer, there are always multiple layers to every feeling we feel. At least when we allow ourselves to truly feel them. And that is what I tried to do when writing them, just feel.


There’s a strong sense of place in the novel: apartments, streets, abandoned buildings all carry weight and atmosphere. Did you base these settings on real locations?

Most of them, yes. Not that towns in particular really matter to the impact of the story, but in case anyone was wondering, the main settings for the real events that the novel is based on were the two Irish towns Killaloe and Nenagh, both of which I stayed in when I started writing the book.


The supernatural elements (Ouija boards, spirits, shadows, possessions) are written with unsettling realism. Do you personally believe in the paranormal?

I do. I find it ignorant to just dismiss that there might be things out there that the human mind cannot make any sense of or that our perception of things is even the right one. All of us are limited in what we perceive of the world, because human perception in general is flawed and biased with prior experiences, emotions and expectations. And knowing that what we perceive is never truly what is, how can we then ever rule out that there is more out there than we see or hear?


At its core, the book seems to be about how the past never truly leaves us. What do you hope readers will take away about memory and haunting?

I hope that this book will help others to find the courage that it takes to face what truly shattered you and try to let it go entirely instead of holding on to it in order to fight it.


Now that you’ve written your first mystery, do you plan to continue in this genre, or return to your “big love”, socio-critical novellas?

Oh, I have written mysteries before, just not mysteries that were based on real events. But it´s true, my big love as a writer are deeply symbolic and socio-crytical novellas. Just for the simple fact that I feel like writers are under the obligation to comment on their time, its obstacles and problems, and in our time we have enough of them to write a million novellas.

As advertised in the pitch, "The way they leave" is a murder mystery about a geoengineer. How relevant is geoengineering for the plot of the book?

Well, first of all "The way they leave" is only to some degree a murder mystery. It opens on geoengineer Aaron Curbler´s dead body and who killed him is only pieced together throughout the chapters. It isn´t your typical murder mystery, though. For one, that is because typically murder mysteries are novels and not novellas, which means this one is not as descriptive as your regular murder mystery regarding what happens on the outside. To this book, which is typical for a novella opposed to a novel, what is happening on the inside of the protagonists is more relevant than the outer plot. You could say that It is a very character-driven and not so much a plot-driven story. That eventually means that geoengineering as a topic is only as relevant for the plot of the book as it is for the character developments of the protagonists, it is only a means to an end and could have been replaced by a similiiar professional field.

Why include geoengineering in the first place then, if it is somewhat disposable for the story?

Before I even started writing this book I had been playing with the idea to write a more scientific exploration of geoengineering, because it is one of the topics that I think are not even nearly enough out there or discussed at the moment. To be honest I rarely even met people who knew half of the things that geoengineers are messing around with. I think it is important that people in general are being made aware of what geoengineering is, what it includes and what it could cause.


Why do you consider it important?

I feel like most people don´t even know what it entails, and how would they hear about it, anyway? It is like as a topic it is being muted by mainstream media, as if it is either not happening at all, or just nothing to worry about. To be really honest, I think it is outrageous that there isn´t a bigger public discussion about it, because even some better known and publicly speaking geoengineers who seemingly have a good agenda do say that what they are doing could have ugly consequences, they just cannot be sure what is going to happen. If they are aware of this and still do it, then I find it wrong that it wouldn´t be up to us, as in: all of us regular people who are living in this world right now, to take a stand and vote for or against it. Because I do not believe that any government or organisation in the world should have permission to decide for all of us, whether or not it is right to mess with things like the stratosphere, the deep sea, or even the sun.

If geoengineering is only a surface topic of the book, then what´s the story about on a deeper level?

The book is a deep dive into trauma and the thereafter. It explores regrets and trauma-related guilt, because I think for people in general looking for someone to blame is a natural reaction to traumatising events, and if they cannot find anyone but themselves then sometimes their mind has to go into self-preservation-mode and warp what they call their reality, so they cannot help but live a lie in the end. There is a quote by Soren Kierkegraad that says "most peolpe settle for a level of despair that they can tolerate and call it happiness`, which is spot on, in my opinion, and I think for the main characters in "The way they leave" it is accurate, too. All of them have had their fair share of trauma and I wanted to explore its consequences and the way that our minds go out of their way to protect us. They are trying everything to make something traumatizing that happened to us more bearable, even if through delusions, obsessions, adictions, and so on. But we have to break that pattern and directly face what has happened, otherwise how can we ever live with it?.


Is there a glimpse of hope in the book, too, a getting over trauma?

Oh, I think severe trauma isn´t something to ever get over. I think we can become aware of it and of what it did to us and we can accept it as being a part of us and a part of our life story. Funny enough, I recently started taking courses to become an art and life story coach, meaning I will be qualitfied to lead clients through narrative trauma exposure and this was one of the backgrounds that led me to write this particular book, because I do think that one of the most important things in dealing with trauma is to integrate it into our life story in a way that makes sense to us and others.


What exactly does that mean, integrating trauma in a life story?

Well, the way we see and tell our life story to ourselves and others has a major impact on our sense of self and on where our life path can and cannot lead us next. All of this sounds simple, but it was only in recent years that I learned how to integrate my own trauma and my reactions to it into my life story in a positive way and in the dedication and the thank you notes of the book I refer to the people who gave me a save enough environment to do so.

Would you call it a book about strong, self-émpowered women?

Well, I suppose you could say that, yes, but I don´t like to put it in the same category as all the millions of books that are riding on the wave of self-empowered women and feminism right now. I think that nowadays feminism is utterly misunderstood and, no offense, but many of the things that are more recently being sold to us as female self-empowerment are actually ridiculous and more a self-discrimination act of women, in my opinion. I do not believe that a self-empowered woman has to go out of her way to live her life absolutely detached from men, and I do not believe either that a woman should ever feel like she has to prove to men or anyone else that she is better at what men were meant to be better at according to the old roles.

What should a self-empowerd woman do then in your opinion?

In my opinion a self-empowered woman doesn´t have to take over everything that used to be ruled by men just to prove that she is self-empowered. A self-empowered woman doesn´t owe anyone proof for her self-empowerment. I think she should feel free to strive in formerly men controlled fields, yes, but shouldn´t feel forced to do it either She should love being a woman with all the upsides and downsides. Apart from that, if a female genuinely prefers to cook for a man and to do the cleaning, then she should still feel free to so, without having to explain it, without being looked at as a weak individual, and most importantly without being ostracized as a threat to feminism. The same goes for women who prefer for a man to hold the door open or carry the shopping bags. That should be okay even nowadays. She should never feel shame to go after what she truly wants, after how she truly wants to be treated, or who she really wants to be, no matter what that means.

Would you call yourself a self-empowerd woman?

Oh God, of course I would, but again that is not in the way an utter feminist would mean it nowadays. I do not want to live my life detached from men, and I do not feel the constant need to proof to a man that I could just as well live my life without them. As a woman, I´m self-empowered enough to admit that I love someone, I´m self-empowered enough to want to be good to them, and I´m self-empowered enough to admit that I do appreciate them.

What is the comic element in the book about?

To be honest, the scientific background and info in the book isn´t accurate, and with the comic element I wanted to be self-aware and clearly show the reader that this world is not the real world.

They are both screw-ups. That is about everything that they have in common. Apart from it, they would have had no reason to ever speak: they don’t like the same people, not the same movies, not the same music. Grunge rock horror kind of girl meets hip-hop stand-up type of guy, and that this combination is painful at best, has been common knowledge ever since those grunge rap days, meaning they should have stayed as far away from each other as Kurt Cobain and Eminem.
It worked out differently, though.
Now she is meant to sleep in his broken bed which feels about double as bad as a broken home: bad enough, in fact, to chase her out the squeaking door on a sunny afternoon and make her want to keep running.
She might have been better off following her instincts. Then maybe right now she wouldn’t be drifting in a bent, cold river, trying to fight her way up, as if she were a child with a hot air balloon, who is constantly jumping off the ground in the desperate attempt to float away with it. Then her feet would hit the hard asphalt again to remind her that she is too heavy to make it, and even if it were different, what good would it do? She wouldn’t know anyone up there, because screw-ups like her are not meant to go to heaven but supposed to travel the opposite way.
Her grandmother’s huge and shiny cupboard out of highly polished wood, where she used to play hide and seek with her cousins when she was five years old, is the last thing she ever thinks of. Accordingly, the last thing she ever hears is her grandmother’s voice, as back then she told her with a warm bear fur coat in hand that for beautiful things like this someone sometimes simply has to die.
These are her last thoughts: random, but maybe the last things you ever think of are supposed to be that, because eventually life in itself is just a pile of randomly gathered moments and the last one that falls on top of it unhinges the steeple to cause a collapse.
On the plain and hoarfrost covered stone bed next to the gurgling river a dog walker in ridiculously green shorts and a matching hoodie finds her dead body at six am the next morning. The dog barks, the owner throws up, about which the police officers called won’t be too happy, but this isn’t a crime scene, after all: it is, at most, the site of a suicide, because of which contamination isn’t really relevant.
"Did you touch her? Did you move her?" They want to know, even though, as they arrive. No, none of that, but the now no longer barking dog might have licked her frozen face, which the owner keeps quiet, though, since his dog’s DNA wouldn’t be in their database, anyway.
Ruled an accident. That’s what the file on Marta Lotter’s death confidently states, which is somewhat funny, because if there is something that Marta has never believed in it is accidents. Never mind, now she is dead and has no say in it, either way. Her witty tongue and heart shaped lips have fallen to ashes long ago, and the rest of her, as well, as she went to the crematory the other day.
Usually, her file would have just been put away in an old and dusty folder that would never have seen the light of day again. The reason why it is lying on the cram-full desk of a detective now is a second case like this. Another girl as old as her, no job, no kids, no husband. Another screw-up, so to say, and given the similarities, Detective Stanton doesn’t believe that both of these could have been accidents.
“Suicides, so,” his colleagues try to shrug the oddities away, unwilling to admit that there could be more to it. In fact, there is: so much more than anyone can handle, and all of it started 35 years ago, when a woman called Eva Rice gave birth to a not entirely healthy son.

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A romantic looking ornament frame around a black and white picture, because everything looks better in black and white, and she’d smile on it which she rarely ever did for a camera. That’s what Lina has pictured the cards for her funeral to look like ever since she was 20. They look nothing like it. Holding one of them right now makes me wonder whether she’s ever told anyone but me what she pictured them. Maybe the others didn’t know, or they didn’t have a black and white picture of her, or none at all on which she was smiling. She’d hate it. Especially the colours: aggressively saturated and true to life, which makes no sense, she’d say, for someone who’s dead.
There’s her mother. She is giving me daggers from across the room. I think she knows that I should be the one in the first row, while she should have to sit here, hidden in a corner, like a loose acquaintance Lina didn’t really know. I bet she’s only jealous. Envious of how well I knew her daughter, whereas she had no clue who Lina really was. Just like everyone else who is sitting here, crying.
Do they know she got up at five every day, even when she didn’t have to? Or that every morning she burnt her tongue on her first sip of coffee, because she’d drink it faster than the milk could cool it down? Then she would curse to herself, and try to carry the cup onto the patio, but before she’d reach it, she would have clumsily finished it while walking. That’s when she’d return into the kitchen, shaking her head about her own impatience and the ways it only complicated her life. They know nothing about this, I’m sure. Neither do they know which roads she took home every day. Dark, untraveled ones, on which the old asphalt is barely still hanging on and she’d only take them, because she hated meeting anyone.
They know none of this. They don’t know anything at all.
Why would they buy white roses for her coffin? Or any flowers at all? She’d be furious and rightly so, because it only proves how little they knew her. The white lilies I bought her two weeks ago she only threw against the wall - scattered petals everywhere - and if I were brave enough, I’d sneak out from my corner now, walk up to her coffin and do the same with the roses, knowing that this is what she would have wanted.
Her brother barely looks at me. He is giving a speech up there. Why would he be, I wonder? They didn’t even like each other, and when he rang her late at night, she wouldn’t even take his calls. What would he have to say about her death, when he hardly acknowledged her in life? He is making it sound like she was a nice person who’d cry whenever dog food commercials came on. What is he thinking? She wasn’t nice at all. Anyone can be. She was Lina: screwed up and dark, even violent at times – the crusted scars on my right forearm prove it. A natural disaster, that’s what Lina was and in awe of the chaos she caused. I don’t know about the others, but that’s what I’ve always admired her for.
Will I make it through today, I wonder, without snapping at anyone? This terribly fancy dressed, chain-smoking lady two rows up front… Earlier out in the yard, she was the first person I nearly lost it with, but she will certainly not be the last. She was pretending to cry, although tears weren’t coming. What’s wrong with people? Don’t they understand nonverbal signals anymore? I was avoiding eye contact, because I really didn’t want to talk to her, but she forced me into it nevertheless.
“Sad what a troubled young woman she was, isn’t it? One of the good ones for sure, but they are always the most troubled. She would have deserved so much more!”
Can you please just shut up? Don’t pretend you know what Lina deserved or wanted! What Lina wished for is exactly what she got! And troubled? She wasn’t that at all! This is only what they say about people who they don’t understand.
“How did you know her?” They keep asking, but I cannot tell them and if I did, either way they wouldn’t understand. They would only judge us, me and her, for what we had, in the same way they keep judging her at her own funeral because of the way she came to death. Don’t worry, Lina, I’m not like them. Who would I be to judge you? You know me, that’s not what I do. I guess that’s why you trusted me in the first place
What is her father doing up there, bent over her dead body? It’s outrageous that he is even here. Back off her, old man! How dare you ruin her make-up with your crocodile tears? She still looks so beautiful. It must have taken them ages to restore her battered body, stitch up the wounds on her throat, and rearrange her broken ribs, so her chest wouldn’t look deformed.
Did her parents even see her before they stitched her up? I guess they did. Someone must have identified her, or maybe they only showed them her face, bruised and split up, but she was still recognizable. At least to me she was.
Why do the people right behind me have to whisper all the time? They are ruining the last time I’ll ever get to look at her and what they are talking about isn’t even relevant.
“I only hope she wasn’t scared in the weeks before she died. When was she taken, again?”
Taken sounds like she was an object: something heart- and soulless without a will that couldn’t fight off thieves. Lina wasn’t taken, she wasn’t stolen - she went. She decided to go somewhere she knew she mightn’t ever return from, and she enjoyed it, inspired by darkness and danger.
She was so talented. A master on the paintbrush and always in search of inspiration. I’d like to think I was her muse, if only for a little while. The last picture she painted was her most gruesome and at the same time her best one. Don’t worry, Lina, I will cherish it forever. Till the end of days, it will grace the entrance to my hall. You left it with me, because you knew I would appreciate every brushstroke, every dot, every line in it and even the spots in which your fingernails scraped off the colour in their panic.
You never named it, but when I first saw it, I knew what I would call it. Co-ordinated chaos. Full of feelings – messy – even though its brushstrokes are perfectly ordered. At heart, that is exactly what you were: chaos with an inner order, and – who knows – once I die, your last painting will make you immortal for it and me as well, because you gave birth to it in my decaying woodshed briefly before giving your life.
Should I show it to your family? Probably not, or they realize who I am. They don’t deserve it either way. Not your brother who is wiping his eyes right now, even though he isn’t crying. Not your father who is pretending to join you in your coffin, and not your mother who keeps looking at me weirdly, because she cannot figure out why I am here. They didn’t deserve you, Lina, and they don’t deserve the painting you put your heart and soul into.
“The poor family!” The chatterboxes behind me disturb the silence. “How long did it take the police to find her body, again? A few months, was it?”
It took them exactly 189 days, you cunt! 180 it took them to find a trace of her at all. A strain of hair in the woods where she used to go running. She looked so concentrated whenever she did. As if there was the world on her mind and she was trying to breathe it away, in and out. If I told them any of this, I wonder, would it finally seal their lips? Maybe I should try and if I did, I would possibly be able to feel my fingers again. If my cramping fist won’t loosen up anytime soon it will fall asleep and I will end up hitting the confessional in order to feel something again.
Just like my hand right now, you must have felt, Lina: numb and heavy during the last months of your life. You didn't want to be here anymore and only ever got into my jeep, so I could take you away. Unlike everyone else in this room, I know the truth. Of course I do, I've watched you long enough.
For months I have seen your despair from the darkest corners of the streets. I have recognized the longing in your paintings whenever I peeked into you window, felt the boredom behind every smile whenever I followed you on your nights out, and read the cryptic suicidal thoughts in your diary, whenever you were asleep.
You wanted to leave because they demanded an orderly life from you.
"I'd rather die," you told your journal, because you couldn't feel alive without chaos.
I hope someday the sobbing hypocrites in this church will understand that it was them what killed you - by trying to take away the mess that living was to you.
I slit your throat, my dear, but I didn't kill you, love. I couldn’t have. Because I loved you, Lina: from afar and without expecting that you’d ever love me back. In fact, my love for you was unconditional enough to end your suffering when I saw it. I did it out of mercy and that I had to do it, is only because of them: the people who surrounded, but never even saw you.

Hush, listen! What you'll hear is the sound of 250 million suicides who are coming back to live.

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