MY NAME MEANS FIRE: A Memoir, unflinching examination of the selves who saved the author

MY NAME MEANS FIRE: A Memoir
ATASH YAGHMAIAN
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An unflinching and stunning debut memoir of an Iranian girl’s coming-of-age experiencing abuse, war, and superstition—and her survival through dissociative identity disorder, which offered her an inner world into which she could escape

When she was a child, Atash Yaghmaian’s home life was unpredictable: a confusing mix of love and terror. Outside of her home, Iran was also on fire. Her reality of abuse, war, gender oppression, and religious superstition left her feeling unsafe everywhere. So, she left reality and disassociated into a place she called the House of Stone: a building in a magical forest full of peaceful creatures, kind talking trees, and volcanoes. Inhabiting this world are 9 beings, each different parts of Atash, who would be her salvation from the external horrors of her outer world.

Set against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime, and the 8-year Iran-Iraq War, My Name Means Fire is Atash’s story of survival as she experiences tragic events including sexual abuse, a mother who subjected her to superstitious rituals, and the horrors of war. In chapters alternating with what’s happening in her outside world, her other parts—each named after a color—tell the story of her inner world, giving readers an understanding of what it’s like to be inside the consciousness of someone who is multiple.

Honest, powerful, and moving, My Name Means Fire is a bold narrative that challenges the stigma and misinformation around dissociative identity disorder (DID) and ultimately reckons with what it takes to survive.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A story not of abuse, but the lengths a mind will go to in order to survive abuse.

Author Atash is a child of war, growing up in revolutionary Iran during its convulsive birth. She had the bad fortune to be female at a time that was becoming as awfully abuse-worthy and dangerous as it can possibly be. She was equally unlucky in having a mother sufficiently divorced from reality as to subject her daughter to bizarre-to-me religious rituals in place of protecting her or getting her proper care.

We had the same mother, Author Atash. Mine had no war to excuse her insanity, but I had the great good luck to be born male. Harms balanced; my heart goes out to you. It won't help forty years later but it is sincere sadness for the things that occurred in your life that caused splitting your mind into compartments was the best way to keep yourself safe.

In this story of peril unprotected, abuse unstopped, and damage unheeded, the one thing that ran through my mind was, "your mind is astoundingly powerful! Your ability to divide yourself into different people, each capable of more than you thought you were, is close to miraculous!"

It was hard to read, I wanted to help her escape her lunatic mother, rescue her from the war-torn horrors around her adolescent self. I hurt for the potential squandered in her awful childhood...a mind this resilient could easily have achieved much more than survival, though it is astonishing she managed to survive. I'm extremely impressed that her life has been such that she was able to conceptualize and create this account of how she came to be a multiple, and how she became a self that could function.

I wished, to be honest, we had spent more time with the multiples, not quite so much detailing their traumatic genesis. It's a quibble, too, that ending the story as she's escaping to the US felt...rushed...but it gives me hope Author Atash will write a volume two. I'm glad I got to meet Fire in her present state.