The Many Appearances of Sharon Mashihi
The latest podcast from Mermaid Palace blurs fact and fiction. It’s not comfortable, and that’s the point.
“Even when you’re telling a true story, there’s some invention.”
A white light falls across Sharon Mashihi’s face as she shifts in her chair to face the camera better. We’re starting to dig into the backstory of Mashihi’s newest fiction podcast, Appearances, which reached its conclusion in October. In the show, Melanie (voiced by Mashihi), a sort-of-single Iranian-American woman who refuses to conform to her family’s cultural standards and who longs to start her own family, decides to begin the journey to become a mother with or without a co-parent.
If some of that feels familiar, you may have heard “Man Choubam (I Am Good)”, Mashihi’s documentary piece produced for KCRW’s UnFictional in 2018. “Man Choubam” is a viscerally raw story about Mashihi’s relationship with her mother and their attempts to come to terms with their differences. They go on a Persian self-help cruise together, hosted by her mother’s favorite Iranian talk-show psychiatrist. During it, the younger Mashihi broaches a conversation with her mom to untangle what it means for Mashihi to not conform to the cultural standard her mother upholds for her.
So, yes, Appearances is fiction, but it’s the kind of fiction that leaves the curtains open so you can look through the windows at the uncomfortable realities of motherhood and intergenerational trauma in a family of immigrants.
This complex relationship with intimacy, secrets, and difficult conversations is a hallmark of Mermaid Palace, the production company behind Appearances (co-produced with Radiotopia). Mermaid Palace has distinguished itself as a place where creators can play in the murky waters between reality and fantasy, using fiction and sound to explore possible realities and personal histories in ways that fold audiences in so close that you might feel a little uncomfortable. And that’s the point.
Discomfort and Audio: When to Erase the Boundary
Appearances’ storyline starts with the description of a fantasy: a Peeping Tom watches Melanie peeing in the bathroom. It’s devastatingly intimate from the start — pushing and pulling the audience through the parts of Melanie’s journey that would be banned from polite conversation, elided over, or faded to black.
It isn’t comfortable to go to a family celebration, as Melanie does, and only be asked when you’re going to find a husband, a family. It isn’t comfortable to achieve a career that you love, but that your family constantly questions. And it isn’t comfortable to listen to Melanie experiencing and doing all those things — down to peeing on a stick and waiting with her in the bathroom, on the toilet, to find out if she’s pregnant. But creating comfortable audio about upsetting realities would be one lie too far.
Sharon isn’t comfortable either.
“I’m so confused, I don’t know if I’m Sharon or if I’m Melanie,” Sharon says in the prologue, laughing with her scene partner. (I’ll be using “Sharon” to refer to the Mashihi that exists in audio and “Mashihi” for the Mashihi I interviewed) “I think I’m — just call me Melanie,” Sharon stutters, and he laughs. This single moment encapsulates the tense tightrope that Appearances flutters on between fiction and truth; within the first two minutes of the podcast, the boundary is erased.
Just call her Melanie. And we would, except Sharon still makes her appearance throughout.
“I thought that this show could be a magical universe where all the things I’m confused about in my life could be worked out and explained,” Sharon says in episode seven, coming out from behind the wizard’s curtain to lay bare the indecision and uncertainty that permeates every corner of the audio. The Sharon in audio is apologetic when she interrupts Melanie, with her voice echoing as though from on high, reminiscent of an uncertain god.
The Sharon Mashihi in our interview is steady in her artistic choices and the purpose of Appearances, but she still understands the discomfort. “The whole point of this show is for me to live out a possible future that I’m not sure if I will live out.” Like Melanie, Mashihi wants to be a mother, and she has questions about if she’s going to be a single mother by choice. Like Melanie, she wonders what it would mean for her relationship with her family and community.
The Community in Great Neck Gets Very Close
The bulk of Appearances takes place in Great Neck, New York, which is also where Mashihi grew up. When I ask her about Great Neck, she talks me through a mini-tour of streets named after American poets populated with synagogues and home to Gino’s, “the best pizza place on Earth.” She describes the Persian hub for groceries, Everfresh, which used to be Shop Delight, where it is “a matter of pride to show up there with your adult daughter and buy your groceries together.” A picture starts to emerge of a densely populated small area, where your cousins and your grandparents are all in walking distance and the Iranian Jewish population is only growing.
In Appearances, that population can be found in Fariba, the all-encompassing older neighbor who watches everyone, and who never married and never had children. Fariba is welcoming, firm, kind, and honest, in ways that individual people, real people, rarely are. She’s a character, but she’s also a mechanism for Sharon and Melanie to puzzle out their current and future relationships with their mothers, and Fariba knows it.
“I needed one character to represent the community because the eyes of the community, the sense of always being watched, and being afraid of being watched and seen, was so palpable for me growing up,” Mashihi told me.
And then of course, there’s the fact that Melanie, and Sharon, crave witnesses. “[Melanie] wants to believe that somebody cares about what is what is happening to her because she’s not sure if her family does. And so, it’s never really clear if Fariba really exists, or if she’s Melanie’s fantasy… She serves as the wish for a parental figure to be watching your every move and caring about it,” Mashihi told me.
The Uncomfortable Reality of Intergenerational Trauma
Midway through the series, Melanie breaks down when talking with her friend Kaitlin, played by Mashihi’s real life friend (and the series editor), Kaitlin Prest:
“At what point does your life get to be yours?” Kaitlin asks, after Melanie agonizes for what feels like the millionth time over her family and community’s reactions to her having a baby on her own.
“I don’t know when my life gets to be mine! Maybe never!” Melanie shrieks.
This conversation cuts straight to the quick, an echo of when a younger Melanie gives up on telling her mother that she has a boyfriend. It’s an audio moment that bleeds, one that’s recognizable by those children of immigrants who feel trapped by the expectations of their communities. Appearances does not gloss over anything, and that includes the frustrating roundabout that people like Melanie face when balancing their own choices for their own lives and how those choices will reflect upon their family.
When I ask Mashihi about the relationship between her mother as she appears in “Man Choubam” and Vida, the mother in Appearances, she has to talk more about truth, and fiction.
“[In “Man Choubam”], I was portraying [my mother] from a specific angle, my perspective, and not only from my perspective, but the perspective that best served the story,” she says of the documentary, which features reels of interview tape and conversations recorded on the cruise ship. “I don’t know anything about my own mother’s childhood, really. My mother is kind of averse to talking about the past. And it’s kind of like, everyone in my family says that they don’t have a good memory. I don’t even know much about my own siblings.”
Appearances is already so close to Mashihi’s life that when it came to Vida, it was crucial that she not be Mashihi’s mother.
“I started working on Vida by writing a long life story for her and creating stories from her childhood, stories of her relationship with her own mother, stories of life back in Iran. And they were all made up,” Sharon gesticulates with her hands here, an encompassing fluttering gesture that emphasizes the creative fantasy work that went into Vida. “I was like, maybe this happened to my mom, maybe this happened to my mom, like using my mom to bounce Vida off of… and I interviewed a few Iranian women who are in my mother’s generation. So I was just kind of like, using all of that to guess about Vida.”
Mashihi pushes and pulls the audience into various comfort zones, and does the same with her characters. She pushes them farther away and then pulls them closer in like a dance; it achieves the sensation of a real story based in truth, but with enough fiction and distance that it’s not precisely her own life.
Melanie has a father who works as a carpet salesman and a younger brother who does first all the things that Melanie’s family wants for her: get married and have a child. Mashihi also has a brother and a father who sells carpets — but she also has a sister, a fact that surprises Vida.
“You have a sister?” Vida remarks. “Why isn’t she in the show?” But Sharon just says, “In a way, I think she is in the show. I think of Melanie as my sister.”
By this point, Sharon has already attempted to recreate the distance between herself and this fiction family by “rebuilding the fourth wall” with the sound of digital bricks being laid. She’s pushed Melanie away, solidifying her as her own character with her own story. In accepting Melanie as a part of her family, Sharon has pulled her back in just enough to sustain the tension between fiction and truth that Appearances balances on.
The constant tense and uncertain interplay between Melanie and Sharon is highlighted by the fact that Sharon isn’t just the writer of Appearances and its characters, but also the primary voice actor. She voices Melanie, every character in Melanie’s family, Fariba, the fertility doctor, and multiple therapists, among others. She breathes character into everyone who witnesses Melanie’s life, becoming the people who interrogate Melanie — and thus Sharon — about her choices and her emotions.
The result is striking. Sharon is adept at modulating her pitch, volume, and tone in order to affect characters, but even so, the audience knows it’s the same voice actor; it’s not a secret. It feels like living inside Sharon’s head, where she acts out these conversations in private. The fact that she performs them all lends a certain feeling of unreality, but also of familiarity for anyone who has anxiously performed a thousand permutations of a difficult conversation.
Mashihi has been worried about the response of people who might see themselves in this work. She has grappled with stereotyping her family and community with the accents and dialects she affects, and what it means if and when they listen.
“I question if “stereotype” is always bad,” she muses when I ask her about stereotyping in mainstream media. “It’s too delicious to not have a little laugh at the parents’ expense for some like, quintessentially brown immigrant way that they are. And I guess I tend to think that if you’re of the culture, and that you are also doing care work on the other side to portray complexity, a laugh here and there is, I don’t know, worth it, maybe.”
She pauses.
“And cathartic.”
Catharsis by Way of Intimacy
Cathartic is an ideal word to describe Appearances. This story, weird and wonderful, faces the ordeal of being witnessed and known with a full and unsteady heart. Melanie fulfills a possible future for Sharon, and Fariba validates that future’s existence.
In the end, Melanie does have her baby, but that doesn’t mean the uncertainty is over, for Melanie or for Sharon. We cycle through possible futures seen mostly through the eyes of Melanie’s child. In one, Melanie’s relationship with her mother is irreparable. In another, it shudders back into place much later. It feels right to have a resolution that is uncertain about the future, but hopeful that people within families and communities love one another in ways that must, undeniably, change over time. All we have are uncomfortable truths and possible futures, and we must all learn to honor and accept them.
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