Universal Topics: Author Iman Hariri-Kia on Media, Publishing, and Building a Life That Makes You Happy
By Julia Gamolina
Iman Hariri-Kia is a writer, editor, and author born and based in New York City. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and an award-winning journalist, she covers sex, relationships, identity, and adolescence. Her work has appeared in Vogue, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Teen Vogue, and more. Her debut novel, A Hundred Other Girls, was published in July 2022 to critical acclaim. Her sophomore novel, The Most Famous Girl In The World, will be published in September 2024. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Iman talks about developing her focus in media and completing her first novel, advising those just starting their careers to not be afraid to let go of things no longer serving you.
JG: I’m super excited to speak with you because you’re one of the few people I know who grew up with a mother who is an architect. Tell me about this, and tell me about how you see this influence in your day-to-day today.
IHK: I really feel like I grew up with my mother and my aunt’s firm, Hariri & Hariri, both physically and psychologically. My childhood home, the apartment that I grew up in in Greenwich Village, was situated above their first office – they worked on the ground floor, and our apartment was on the tenth. When I was younger, my sister and I would come home and immediately go to their office where my mom would set us up with a station of model-building equipment – styrofoam, wooden panels, superglue, and tons and tons of paper. While my mom would work and take meetings with Mojgan and her team, my sister and I would be building things.
I learned very quickly that I had absolutely no talent for anything visual [laughs], so I started writing instead. I would take her notepads, that were meant to be used for rendering, and write in them. In that sense, I was always very hyper aware of what my mom did. She was very proud of her work as an architect, she was very proud to be a working mother, though there were times where I didn’t fully understand the sacrifices that she had to make. As I grew older, I understood why my mom split her time, and I respect her so much. The greatest advantage for me was having a mom who stood out, not just because she was a female architect, but because she was also in the Persian community. I really felt in my bones that I could pursue any sort of creative inclination, with my full chest, and expect to be successful at it. It’s the greatest gift my mother, and really both of my parents gave me, encouraging me to nurture any creative impulse I had and that I could turn it into a career.
Merch by Iman!
You are now a novelist but you first started working in media! Tell me about your start.
I knew I wanted to write in some capacity. I felt really connected to young adult novels and teen magazines growing up, because they truly taught me about what it was like to be an American teenager. I clung to the principles I learned between those pages. I wrote my first op-ed when I was fifteen – it was for the Huffington Post – about experiencing Islamophobia in post-9/11 New York. My freelance career evolved from there, by which I mean that I was writing and pitching, often to no avail, but this allowed me to start building my byline. When I was in school, I started creative writing, and I did a lot of literary internships at literary journals, magazines, etc. I actually interned at Surface magazine in college and learned a lot about how a print magazine operates from this experience.
Then when I was a college senior, I wrote my honors thesis on the nine stages of female puberty. I was really fascinated by adolescence and the way that female bodies change. At the time, there was so little literature available about the icky and gooey parts behind women’s maturity that felt accessible! So I was really just fascinated by the intersection between lyric, creative writing, and prose, and I wanted to interview a lot of people to better understand these topics.
How did you develop your focus on writing about sex and relationships?
Right out of school, I was working for Teen Vogue during the height of its sociopolitical evolution, which was really exciting because I got to write about identity and the confluence of identity and fashion. I was there until the magazine folded in 2017, and then I went to Bustle as a staff writer, where I reported to the sex and relationships editor. I fell in love with the universality of the topic, and realized that doing a lot of the work I had already been doing about female puberty was so closely tied to these themes. From there I went to League Daily, where I worked as the sex and dating editor, covering everything from sexuality, gender identity, sexual health, and consent education. I really loved finding my voice not only as a writer, but as a sex and relationships editor, and building an audience under the S&R umbrella.
I returned to Bustle shortly after that, relaunched the sex and relationships vertical there, and I was also writing a column for Man Repeller, where I interviewed older women each month about specific topics. Then I went to Her Campus Media, young adult media, to relaunch the Her Campus site for a Gen Z audience. I was there until 2022. I left about a month before my first book came out and that is when I decided to focus full time on writing. Now I’m splitting my time between working on my novels and freelance writing for different publications.
“I felt really connected to young adult novels and teen magazines growing up because they truly taught me about what it was like to be an American teenager. I clung to the principles I learned between those pages.”
Congratulations! That’s a big and exciting step and I’m so inspired. I’ve heard writers say that writing novels is the hardest thing they’re ever done – tell me about your creative process behind it, the routines you had to establish to follow through on the full transcript, all of it.
I started writing my novel in late 2019 when I was working full time at Elite Daily, and it took me three years from when I sat down to start writing it to when it hit the bookstands. In many ways, the process felt longer because I was thinking, obsessing, and percolating on the topics and storyline for One Hundred Other Girls, probably since my very first job at Teen Vogue. I really loved working on it while I was still working full time in media because in some ways, even though it was a lot of work, it was really rewarding to have a project that was creatively all mine.
I wrote the first draft over the course of three or four months, and I didn’t tell a single person that I was working on it. When I finished, I couldn’t believe that I had made the time to write a three-hundred page book while editing a full-time vertical and freelance writing part-time. People ask me all the time how to get started – it’s really just a thousand words here and there, or two chapters a week, and eventually being really stringent with that word count and piecing it together one step at a time. In my experience, the hardest part of writing a book is that first draft. You always hit a slump at the one-third mark and the two-third mark, and you have to push yourself to finish. But once you do and start revising, all the pieces that you know can be better and stronger will be.
Iman’s first novel, One Hundred Other Girls.
Lesley Lokko, who I interviewed earlier this year, said that writing a novel is not unlike seeing an architectural project through, and it sounds like it! I think designers can really relate to the one-third and two-third mark. Once you had written it, what was the process like for getting it published?
After I finished the first draft in 2019, I started editing it myself in early 2020. Then I sent it to beta readers, got their feedback, made more revisions, and then it was March 2020. The pandemic hit New York City hard, and I shelved the novel for a few months, partly because it didn’t feel like the right time to be self-promoting, and partly because I felt really lethargic and hopeless and wasn’t inspired to work on my own projects; I was just so concerned about the state of the world. Then in the summer of 2020, the summer of reckoning after the killing of George Floyd, there were real conversations happening in both media and publishing about diversity and inclusion, and representation versus tokenization. For the first time, I thought, “My novel explores a lot of these topics…maybe there’s a real need for this story right now.”
I returned to it and queried agents that summer, signing with my agent in late August of 2020. I went to submission in the fall, sold my novel, and finally began working on it officially with my editor in 2021. Publishing works very slowly – you really have to exhibit a lot of patience. Sometimes there’s a million things for you to do and sometimes all there is to do is wait, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. The process has been incredibly rewarding, and connecting with readers who felt drawn to or moved by my work is just surreal. It’s a dream – I get to pay rent with my words, I get to tell stories for a living, and I just hope that I get to keep doing this for a long time.
“If you’re a woman, constantly check in with yourself and make sure that what you’re doing, the relationships that you’re in, and the life that you’re building are still things that make you happy and still what you want today.”
In some of these veins, we talk about how male-dominated architecture is – have you encountered this in media or in publishing?
What’s interesting about media is that there are a lot of white men behind closed doors, making decisions about where money is allocated, how to keep media companies afloat, and who gets to keep their jobs. I found that inside of women’s media, which is where I worked, the majority of people doing the creative work are women, and that’s something my novel One Hundred Other Girls explored ad nauseam. You have the old guard, the women who work in print and are fighting for resources, contrasted with the new guard, the young women and people who work in digital. But really it’s all irrelevant because the industry is the real enemy. There are men behind the curtain who could lay off your entire team.
Publishing is definitely male-dominated, and especially by white straight men. This is something that I realized early on in my experience, even though the majority of my teams were made up of women and women of color. But on my book tour, I was often the only woman on panels, and often the only young woman of color. Something that I realized very quickly is that people will meet you, typecast you, and underestimate you, and I’ve enjoyed proving people wrong. Something that I’d love to see change in publishing is to see novels with diverse protagonists be given equitable budgets. Women and people of color are given much smaller marketing attention for distribution, and are told that their audiences are incredibly niche. So their books aren’t given the same fighting chance at success. I think that yes, I’m very proud of my work on One Hundred Other Girls, but the reason I’ve been successful is because I wasn’t told that my book was for a niche audience. Unfortunately, a large part of my cohort of writers do not get that same opportunity. That’s something I’d really love to see change in the industry as a whole.
What have you learned in the last six months?
My biggest lesson recently is that all the success in the world – all of the accolades, the best-selling titles, the film and TV adaptations, the awards – they truly mean nothing if you are not mentally and physically well enough to appreciate them. What I now want out of my career, and largely my life, is to continue to tell stories to an audience that wants to hear them, and to feel mentally and physically fit, so that I can enjoy my life and spend time with my loved ones. Any sort of creative work, and I’m sure architecture is similar as I talk to my mom about this, can be a lot. If you get caught up in the industry bullshit, you truly lose touch with reality and with what’s important.
Iman in her hometown.
Who are you admiring right now?
I read a lot of really incredible debuts this year, and I’d love to shout out a few debut novels by fellow marginalized authors that I think deserve your attention – Homebodies by Tembe Denton-Hurst, Old Enough by Haley Jakobsen, and Flux by Jinwoo Chong. I’m so inspired by the work of my peers.
Finally, what advice do you have for those just starting their careers? Do you have any advice specifically for women?
If you’re just starting your career, my best piece of advice is that people, and especially women, are conditioned to believe that quitting is a form of weakness, and that we need to relentlessly pursue what we think our dreams and goals are. I actually think there is no greater strength in this world than walking away from something that is no longer serving you. If you’re a woman, constantly check in with yourself, and make sure that what you’re doing, the relationships that you’re in, and the life that you’re building are still things that make you happy and still what you want today. Don’t hold yourself to the versions of yourself that existed yesterday, a year ago, or five years ago. Treat yourself with grace and kindness, and don’t be afraid to allow yourself to evolve and grow.