Arlington Author’s First YA Novel Explores the Desire to Fit In

Yasmin’s mom weighs her every Saturday. She restricts what Yasmin can take to school for lunch and rejoices when Yasmin starts skipping dinner. To her, thinness is everything.

For local author Rebecca Morrison, that was life. The Iranian-American writer weaves aspects of her own personal story into her debut young adult novel, The Blue Dress, which releases on March 24 from Macmillan Publishers.

Mother-daughter relationships were a recurring theme in stories she had published in The Washington Post, The New York Times and HuffPost. But she always wanted to write a memoir.

In September of 2022, Morrison attended a book publishing conference in New York and met an editor from Macmillan Publishers who said her story should be a young adult novel. “She said, ‘I think you should turn your story into a novel for teens because girls are going to need your story,'” Morrison says. “I switched right away.”

After a year of writing, she sent the Macmillan editor a draft because, “she was so kind to me and took the time to really believe in me.” A book contract followed.

Real-Life Struggles

The loosely autobiographical novel tells the story of 12-year-old Yasmin Safavi, a seventh grader in Ashbury Hills, Virginia, a fictional place loosely based on Falls Church. Yasmin has moved to Virginia from Iran with her parents and younger brother. Her mother sewed her a blue dress for a school dance, but it’s too tight. It hangs in Yasmin’s room as a constant reminder of her mother’s disappointment.

Yasmin uses food as a coping mechanism. She digs into snacks she hides under her bed and indulges in the fried and sugary foods her mother forbids while hanging out with friends. To look more American, she starts straightening her curly hair, plucking her brows and wearing makeup to gain acceptance from the school’s “in” crowd. She stops eating dinner with her family to drop pounds. She starts binging and purging.

“A lot of the scenes in the book are real,” says Morrison, who gave the main character her own middle name. “My mom did make me a blue dress. She sewed it for me. She didn’t make it tight, but she weighed me, and I did develop a eating disorder, and I did have bulimia for many years.”

Yasmin’s best friend notices her struggles and confides in a trusted teacher. He refers Yasmin to the school counselor, who meets with her parents. Afterward, Yasmin comes home to a bouquet of roses in her room, a quasi apology from her mother. That triggers a screaming match that ends with Yasmin tearing up the blue dress.

“That’s [partly] what happened to me. I walked home from counseling and there were roses in my bedroom,” Morrison says.

Living Her Dream

A turning point for Yasmin is being called a terrorist by a schoolmate. Morrison, also a painter, recalls taking a local art class and sharing that she is from Iran. A fellow student in the class said, “Don’t worry. She’s not a terrorist.”

“It doesn’t sound like that much, but it destroyed me for a couple days,” she says. “It shatters your entire image of who you think you are and immediately makes you a full other…so I wrote that experience for Yasmin.”

Like Yasmin, Morrison was born in Iran and left as a child. She was 8 years old when she moved to Canada with her parents and two brothers in 1979. She later came to the DMV to attend Georgetown University, then lived in Clarendon while attending The George Washington University’s law school.

She was living in Chicago and working as a lawyer for United Airlines when she met her husband. But “the only place I wanted to be was Arlington,” she says. They returned 2001, first to Courthouse, then South Arlington and finally, Clarendon, where they’ve lived for 20 years.

During the pandemic, Morrison lost her job to cutbacks and decided to pursue her dream of writing. The first story she ever published was “Belonging to America,” an essay in Arlington Magazine in March 2021. Two years later, HuffPost was the first national publication to publish her work—a piece about being an immigrant and dealing with racism. It went viral.

“The editor told me at least 3 [or] 4 million people have read it,” Morrison says. “That piece is the most-read piece I’ve ever had.”

Repaired Relationship

Today, Morrison and her mother get along well. “I have a great relationship with my mom now,” she says. “When I had kids 20 years ago, we became closer, and through the years we’ve grown to really understand each other. We talk every day on [FaceTime].”

She now recognizes that her mom’s actions were intended helpful, born of wanting the best for her daughter.

Morrison, now a mother of two adult boys, hopes The Blue Dress gives readers of all ages a sense of being recognized, perhaps prompting them to re-examine their own parent/child relationships.

“I’d love for this book to create a dialogue between parents and kids, between counselors and kids, between teachers and kids,” she says. “A great teacher will change your life. A great counselor will save your life.”

The story is also about immigrants—a fraught and timely topic, given the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. The book offers a glimpse of Iranian culture through family dynamics, beloved foods and the overall way of life.

“It’s so complicated how Iranians feel now in America,” Morrison says. “It’s like your parents are divorced and they’re trying to kill each other. It’s weird because [I’m] American and [I] love [my] country, but I’m from Iran and that’s who I am. There’s that culture, and there’s generations of my ancestors and my traditions.”

She’s already working on her second book, an adult novel about a woman in Iran, from age 16 into her 50s. She hopes to publish it in the next couple years.

Meet Morrison on April 25 during a book launch party and author talk at the R.E.A.D. Book Nook in Ballston Quarter, 4238 Wilson Blvd., Arlington.