Atash Yaghmaian's transformative memoir, My Name Means Fire, answers a question she often hears: "But how did you survive?" To endure a childhood defined by horrific experiences, she "left reality. Just like that." She later learned her coping mechanism had a name, dissociative identity disorder (DID), tainted with stigma and judgment. "I've heard many colleagues say that people like me are 'too crazy' or 'too hopeless' to treat rather than seeing dissociation as the lifesaver it can be and has been for me." After years of experience as a therapist in New York City, she ferociously challenges that stifling perception: "Through the many trauma survivors I've worked with, I've come to see the blessing in dissociation and am determined to tell my story now in order to give hope to others."

Yaghmaian's family, even before her birth, began with alarming circumstances: when her father--"a scrawny young man"--sent his own mother with a marriage proposal to Atash's mother (whose beauty was legendary), she immediately refused him because "she knew she could do better." But when her rejection led to his attempted suicide, she relented and married him as soon as he recovered. "What might have been a red flag for some was exactly the sign she was waiting for: a man who would give his life for her." First, they had a son. When her mother became pregnant with Yaghmaian, her energy seemed boundless: "People used to come up to him and say, 'There's a fire in your wife's belly,' and so my father called me 'Atash,' which means fire in Persian."

Their union ended before her first birthday. Her mother blamed Atash: "Fire has a spirit.... With that name, you brought a spirit into my life, one that burned my marriage." After the divorce, her mother returned home to her own mother, Maman Bozorg, who became caretaker for Yaghmaian and her brother. Maman thought nothing of tying the siblings to their beds whenever she needed to leave: "This is what my mother did to me when I was your age and what I did to your mother." That early pattern of psychological and physical abuse never relented, while Atash grew up during the Iranian Revolution, then the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, amid ongoing danger, violence, and destruction. And yet, for the young girl, home proved far more dangerous. Sexual abuse began at age five. At seven, Maman Bozorg's cousin, "a very well-respected religious leader" referred to as "the saint," viciously raped her. Other sexual predators targeted her, including the boy next door and her own stepfather.

Her beloved Uncle Hossain, who was both her protector and sometime babysitter, taught her "everything about how to prepare heroin" by age nine. At the end of elementary school, bullies called her "ugly Terhani" and threw rocks as big as grapefruits at her, landing her in the hospital. Her own mother regularly made her ill, trapping her in a cycle of Munchausen syndrome by proxy: she recalled a memory of having worms because her mother fed her "dog shit. On [her] china plates." Her mother reacted: "I know you always had an imaginative mind.... You were always a strange, mean child, trying to get your mother in trouble. It was so long ago too. You need to let it go."

Let go and leave is exactly what Yaghmaian did from her earliest years by disassociating to escape terror and torture. She moved into a refuge in her mind. "When I first came to the House of Stone, the housekeepers brought me a wooden box and told me to put my memories into it... I put in a few memories of being hurt by people who were supposed to love me. I took some old screams from out of my throat and slid them into the dark, warm box. It felt like a relief to put them away." Distinct personalities emerged, each "called only by their favorite colors," each a distinct being separate from Yaghmaian. Each of her nine colorful selves help her live.

Alternating between narrating her "outer life," Yaghmaian structures her memoir to give her other selves the chance to introduce and share their own stories. Little girl Red is the first guide to the House of Stone. Inside the House, "real boy" Blue gets to "look like [himself]." Orange, the oldest girl, "take[s] care of the others." Green tends the garden where she can create any manner of antidotal teas. Gray is "ready to kill any motherfucker who tries to get inside these walls." Black emerges as the leader they all need. Her "magical forest... was [her] salvation," but to be "truly free," Yaghmaian "had to leave [her] family, the House, and Iran for good." After escaping Iran, she lands at JFK alone at 19. Although burdened with the prospect of an arranged marriage, she heads out "toward the life I knew I was going to have to build myself."

Yaghmaian is an open, forthright writer without screens or artifice. Perhaps because she composes in a second language, eschewing her native Farsi, Yaghmaian's prose carries a fierce directness. That the book took 12 years to complete speaks to her tenacity and determination to help others: "Many people with our condition end up killing themselves.... We wrote this book for them, and for all who are ready to heal their childhood traumas." Transparently, resolutely, Atash Yaghmaian channels the power of her fiery name to illuminate a path toward hope and healing. --Terry Hong

Atash Yaghmaian (photo: Ori Dubow)

Atash Yaghmaian's My Name Means Fire (Beacon Press, October 14, 2025) is a haunting memoir of coming-of-age amid historical turbulence and horrific personal trauma. As a child in Iran, Yaghmaian lived through the Iranian Revolution, then the Iran-Iraq War, but home--where she endured verbal, physical, and sexual assaults--proved significantly more perilous. To stay alive, she left reality and moved into multiple selves. Her impassioned memoir recounts how that fluid ability to disassociate saved her life.

Your memoir takes readers from your precarious childhood in Iran to your solo arrival in New York at age 19. You're incredibly open about your dissociative identity disorder. When and how did the official diagnosis come about? And what was your reaction? Has that initial reaction evolved in the years since?

My first diagnosis with DID happened when I was 18, in Iran, after a suicide attempt. I had the good fortune to be seen by a really kind doctor who noticed my amnesia and correctly saw that it was a protective mechanism. At first, when he used the term "multiple personalities," I was frightened, because in Iran, saying someone has multiple personalities is often used to insult them. But he was kind and generous, and it planted a seed in me that, many years later, would sprout in wanting to understand my condition instead of run from it. Later, in the U.S., I was also misdiagnosed many times: depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia. It was only when I met my therapist Nancy, many years later, that she helped me accept my own condition. 

In a previous exchange about doing this q&a, you used this phrase: "so that all my parts can understand what's happening." Could you explicate further? Might I ask who is answering these questions?

All of me is answering these questions! The nice thing about doing an interview by text is that it gives all parts of me a chance to reflect and answer each question. If it were a live interview on camera with a time pressure, the part that hears the question would probably be the one that answers. Either way, my parts trust that whoever needs to come out will give an answer that we're all okay with. We've worked on this for many years. 

When did you decide you would write this book and so candidly share your difficult survival with strangers? What prompted this determination?

When I came to the U.S., I brought with me the mystery of my own condition. In order to make sense of my reality and things I forgot, I kept a journal. By doing that, I started to see the magic in writing: not only to make sense of my days, but to witness different parts of me on the page. Any time I shared my story with people, they would say, "You should write a book." So I decided to start writing a memoir, but at first, I didn't put any pressure on myself to publish it. That gave me the strength to really tell the truth. I also started taking memoir-writing classes at that point.

How did you approach the actual process of writing, particularly in welcoming/inviting all your different selves to contribute?

There were nine parts of me that wrote the book, even though now we are 13. At first, we were only telling the story of our outer world--the girl who grew up in Iran, experienced war, revolution, ritual abuse, and incest. Eventually, we were able to come up with a coherent narrative. But still something was missing. We hadn't really gotten to the truth of how we survived. The answer was: because of our multiplicity. So it was necessary to include our inner world and listen to more parts, even when it made the narrative more complicated. This is why the whole process took more than a decade. 

You left behind many relationships when you came to the U.S. Your mother, who likely suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, looms large throughout your book. Have you somehow made peace with your relationship with her? 

I have made peace with the fact that there is not much change likely to happen in that relationship. My mother hasn't been interested in growing with me, but I'm grateful for the life she has given me.

How do you balance an active therapy practice of your own with your writerly self? How does helping others face/address/recover from trauma affect your understanding of your past selves?

The good thing about being multiple is that we have a lot of energy! If one of us gets tired, another part can step forward. So even after seeing a lot of clients, the parts of me that like to write still have the stamina to do that. Helping people--even when they are in a lot of distress--always makes me feel rejuvenated. Also, by learning to validate other people's pain, we came to have an easier time validating our own.

You end the memoir with a letter addressed to "Dear Parts of Mine I Have Not Yet Met." Since completing the process of creating this book, other "parts" have emerged. What more did you discover about your selves in remembering and freeing your/their past?

Four more parts have come forward since we finished the book: Pink, Lilac, Purple, and Four. In the beginning of my journey, the parts that arrived usually carried a memory of something very painful from the past, such as my abuse or experiences with violence. But lately, the parts that have been arriving tend to carry more of a wish to live a fuller life. Pink, for example, really wants us to be dancing, so we've been doing that a lot! Lilac really wanted us to stop working at our high-stress job, so we quit it! Purple likes to work out. But more shall be revealed as they start to share their memories more. It takes time, and we don't put pressure on parts to speak prematurely.

Do you have any expectations from your readers-to-be?

I want my readers to come to my book with open hearts and open minds, and to try to identify with the feelings rather than comparing the details of their stories to mine.

Your epilogue briefly shares some of what happened post-U.S. arrival, to eventually being settled in a NYC psychotherapist's office. You also add, "There's another book to write." Might we expect a sequel soon?

Yes, expect a sequel! I'm working on it as we speak. The next book will be about the years I spent in the U.S. as an undocumented and sometimes homeless immigrant. The book will still be about DID, since in those years I still didn't completely understand my condition. But instead of my parts telling separate stories in separate chapters, they start communicating with each other within the same narrative. --Terry Hong