Melody Moezzi - The Rumi Prescription: How an Ancient Mystic Poet Changed My Modern Manic Life

PRAISE FOR THE RUMI PRESCRIPTION

The Rumi Prescription is a testament to the healing power of art and its ability to bring peace to our battered souls. Sometimes the cure we need is not a pill, but a poem.

Firoozeh Dumas, New York Timesbestselling author of Funny in Farsi

As a lover of beautiful sentences and a secret self-help addict, I gobbled up this groundbreaking book, relishing the language, the wisdom, and the vivid and moving portrait of a father and daughter. Whether you read it for its fine translations of Rumi, its engrossing story, or as a practical guide for self-care, please give yourself the gift of reading The Rumi Prescription.

David Gessner, New York Timesbestselling author of All the Wild That Remains and The Tarball Chronicles

Melody Moezzi takes Rumi down from a dusty bookshelf, breathes life into his ancient wisdom, and makes him our guide through common contemporary struggles: anger, anxiety, distraction, and more. The Rumi Prescription translates the wisdom of a medieval mystic into the voice of a wise, honest, irreverent friend who tells us what we most need to hear.

Krista Bremer, author of My Accidental Jihad and A Tender Struggle

A stunning memoir. Melody Moezzi merges medieval poetry with modern drama, exploring love, politics, and mental health. Original translations of Rumis poems are interspersed with ruminations on fatherhood, feminism, and self-care, offering insights that will change your life. I wish I could prescribe this memoir.

Dr. Seema Yasmin, MD, author of Muslim Women Are Everything: Stereotype-Shattering Stories of Courage, Inspiration, and Adventure

This book enlightened, delighted, and actively helped me. Its a love letter sent across centuries, from one artist to anotherand decades, from a daughter to her fatherand in the here and now, from a writer to her readers. The Rumi Prescription is the sweetest medicine Ive ever taken.

Nina de Gramont, author of The Last September

The Rumi Prescription is a joy to read.

Ellen Forney, New York Timesbestselling author of Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me

[The Rumi Prescription] could shatter a variety of prejudices and stereotypes.... A heartening narrative of family, transformation, and courage.

Kirkus Reviews

PRAISE FOR HALDOL AND HYACINTHS

Whipsmart but whimsical... Moezzis fierce honesty and comic self-deprecation bind together winningly.

The Boston Globe

Blistering, brash and irreverent... [Moezzis] courageous postcard from the edge cant come too soon.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution

A bold, courageous book by a woman who transforms mental illness into an occasion for activism.

Kirkus Reviews

Melody Moezzi is an amazing writer, sharp and witty and very funny, describing life as a young Iranian woman raised by her family in the American Midwest, balancing those two sides of her world and cultures in a pre- and post-9/11 world.

Book Riot

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Copyright 2020 by Melody Moezzi

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Brief portions of the writing herein have been adapted from previously published articles the author has written for different outlets, including bp Magazine,The Christian Science Monitor, The Guardian, HuffPost, Ms., and NBC News.

The Quranic verse written in Arabic calligraphy that appears on the facing page is by imransheen.

TarcherPerigee with tp colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Ebook ISBN 9780525537779

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

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In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

To Baba Ahmad,
for always being my ham-del,
even if we havent always been ham-zaban

CONTENTS

AUTHORS NOTE

Better to be of the same heart than of the same tongue.

Rumi

My mother named me Melody after a song by Bobby Vinton. Its called My Melody of Love, and its bad. Really bad. But my Persian mother was a big fan of the Polish Prince, and the bilingual pop-meets-polka chorus is so admittedly catchy that unless youre aching for an earworm, I highly advise you not to Google it. Still, in 1979, my mom loved that song just as much as she loved the fact that Melody means the same thing in both Persian and English.

My father, on the other hand, wanted to name me Maryam, in honor of the Virgin Mary. But he was still in Tehran, working as an obstetrician delivering other peoples babies, while my mom had already fled on account of Irans brewing so-called Islamic Revolution. After her cushy job as a pathologist peering through microscopes in the hospital basement morphed into a decidedly more dangerous one as a makeshift trauma surgeon tending to bullet wounds in the emergency room, my parents got scared. Six months pregnant, my mom swiftly embarked on an American vacation, so that I could be born here. My father stayed behind to gauge whether we might still have a future in Iran. I, ever impatient and perhaps taking a cue from my mother, proceeded to flee the womb shortly after we arrived in the Statesnearly two months early, fully developed, and sporting a plush Persian head of hair. So it was that halfway across the world, my mother easily won the name debate, and I became Melody, not Maryam.

Ever since, Ive been blessed with an intense appreciation for music and cursed with a staggering lack of talent for it. Years of violin and piano lessons proved this definitively. But neither my atrocious sight-reading nor my dreadful recital performances did anything to curtail my love of musicfor you need not compose, create, or even read a melody to revel in it. Thats the magic of music. It needs no translation. Words, however, do.

While musicians can transcend language, writers are bound by it. Think of all the cheesy lyrics we tolerate and even enjoy in love songs that would induce vomiting if they ever appeared in a book of poetry minus the music. I expect that even the brilliant Beyonc and Jay-Z know that the real genius behind a song like Crazy in Love isnt in the bizarre bridge (