My Name Means Fire: A Memoir

Psychotherapist Yaghmaian recounts in her raw debut the traumas of growing up in late-20th-century Iran and her subsequent experiences with dissociative identity disorder. Born a few years prior to the 1978 revolution, Yaghmaian’s parents divorced before she was a year old—a significant taboo in Iran—and she was sexually abused by a teacher as a young girl. To cope, she frequently retreated “into a place I called the House of Stone: a building in a magical forest full of peaceful creatures,” within which she took on various personas named after her favorite colors. After immigrating to the U.S. at 19, Yaghmaian was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder). “I’d always thought of multiple personalities as something only evil people had,” she writes, but “far from being a curse, DID has been... a coping mechanism that allowed me to survive.” In a bold artistic stroke, Yaghmaian peppers the account with chapters from the perspective of her identities, including Red, her “youngest part,” and Burgundy, a “servant.” That framework sometimes traps Yaghmaian’s insights inside excessively precious language (“Inside the House of Stone, I know every tongue and can read a book like anyone else, but outside, words turn into rivers that carry me downstream to the Witch”). For the most part, though, this is a revelatory look inside a unique mind. (Oct.)