The Ettelaat Banovan collection from1962/ I would always hear my grandmother say that when she was only 21, despite having three small children, she would write poetry and short stories/ she sends one of her stories to the magazine and it wins first place in Iran/ they ask her to send them one of her pictures/ she takes a snapshot of herself wearing a simply lipstick, breathtaking even after all these years/ a few years ago, with help from an old book and magazine collector I was able to find that year’s issues and gift them to Maman Mehri for her birthday/ the day the dealer called me to let me know he’d found the magazine issues, he spoke for a long time about the mythical beauty of women in those times/ the day I went to pick them up, seeing me upset him a lot/ he expected the grandchild of that woman to walk in with long flowing black and white hair/ I picked up three bound volumes/ I gave one to my grandmother, and kept the other two/ I thumbed through them/ looked at the images/ read the articles/ it seemed to me that the stories of women has not changed since half a century ago/ women are still willfully intent on desiring to be more successful and beautiful and shine in different areas of life in the modern world/ they have common pains and problems/ a new project was conceived then/ these papers, black and white, smelling of mold, took volume and color/ the names of all the pieces were picked from the pages used to make them

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