This week’s story, “Process of Elimination,” is about a twenty-six-year-old man who is working in a coffee shop. You’ve often written about the workplace. Why did you want to put a barista at the center of this story?

I’m always looking out for new types of employment that might have the potential for something dramatic, even in their banality. But, when I was first thinking about writing this story, the idea of a barista was not foremost. I knew that I wanted to have a character who had been wrongly accused of a crime—that was foremost—inspired, in part, by the opening line of Kafka’s “The Trial,” which I happened to come across in the public library when I was a teen-ager: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” To be clear, I didn’t read the book when I was a teen-ager, I read only the first line of the book, but its simplicity and its brevity and its unease stayed with me—and, frankly, its humor. It wasn’t until years later that I finally read the entire book, which has also had some influence on this story. Although, in the case of my narrator, the stakes are much lower and the bureaucracy he’s caught up in actually works out in his favor.

Once I had the general idea, as well as the first clause of the opening sentence, I needed to find a character and a situation. “Someone must have been telling lies about . . .” Who are they being told about? Who’s telling them? What are the lies? I wanted to complete that opening line with something unexpected. As ubiquitous as baristas are, I haven’t seen them written about much. As for the inclusion of the stolen tip jar, two separate experiences came to mind when I began writing. The first was that the tip jar at the N.Y.U. Starbucks—which I happen to frequent nearly every day—was removed by the managers because, apparently, they didn’t want students feeling an obligation to have to tip. (Or so I was told by the baristas themselves.) The second was that I once saw a man steal a tip jar from a restaurant and go running down the street, pursued by some of the employees. These separate incidents have always stayed with me. They’re almost like images from a dream, which on the surface appear to be quite straightforward, but in fact hold some deeper meaning for the dreamer (read: me). And so here was my situation—a stolen tip jar—and here was my character, a barista accused of having stolen the tip jar. I was able to compress the conceit of the entire story into the opening line.

The story is set in 2013, in a town in an unnamed New England state. That’s the year the Boston Marathon suffered a terrorist attack in which three people died and hundreds more were injured. The barista shares a first name with one of the bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. When did you first start thinking about incorporating the bombing—and the name—in a story?

By the time I reached the end of the first few paragraphs, I could tell I was already running into structural issues. I needed something more to happen in this story, something more profound, because a stolen tip jar was not complex enough for what I was planning to explore. Ultimately, I wanted the narrator to file a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where, in the climactic final scene, he would come face to face with the accused—his manager—and suddenly be struck by remorse. But I had no way to get him to that point. I’m not quite sure why I thought specifically of the Boston bombing, which had long faded from the news. I’m sure I considered quite a few different scenarios—although I can’t remember any of them now—but, once the Boston bombing came to mind, I knew immediately that it was the perfect framework. I liked that it was an actual event, and that it provided me with so many ready-made things, including the New England location and the name Tamerlan. There was also an appeal about juxtaposing large and small crimes that could play off each other without having to be explained and analyzed outright. I’m always trying to find the balance in a short story between too much and too little complication; too much can overwhelm a story and bog it down, too little will make it feel slight and uninteresting.

You wrote an essay for The New Yorker about the way your name has been mangled on various Starbucks coffee cups over the years. In the piece, you looked back at your unsuccessful attempts to establish a career as an actor and remembered one casting agent’s proposal that you change your name. In the story, the barista recalls a kind middle-school teacher’s suggestion that he call himself Tommy. Does a name like Saïd or Tamerlan come with an assumption about an identity that the bearer may or may not possess?

Tamerlan’s situation is significantly different from my own. He doesn’t seem to have much trouble with his name or identity, with the exception of some unhappy memories of being teased at school. That all changes, of course, once he realizes that he shares the same name with one of the Boston bombers. He’s suddenly self-conscious. He senses danger. He knows implicitly not to mention to the baristas that his family used pressure cookers. In other words, he’s covering up who he is. Up to this point in his life, he has been mostly uninterested in his connection to his family lineage, but, when he finally decides to file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he tries to turn any assumptions made about him to his advantage.

As for me, the assumptions have been more constant and immediate, exemplified by my acting career—short-lived as it was—where I was getting audition calls for cabdriver, deli owner, Third World despot. I was always engaged in a losing struggle trying to assert myself as an American, or at least as someone who had the range to play a wide variety of roles. I even considered changing my name, as per the casting agent’s suggestion, but I understood that concealing something essential about myself would come at a cost. Although, in an alternate reality, it’s quite possible that I would have ended up having a successful acting career on Broadway or in Hollywood—and I would be telling you now that the cost has been well worth it. I think it’s worth noting that since names are so important in this story, I made a point to have Melissa be the only other character who was named. I thought the interplay between the names Tamerlan and Melissa would create a certain subtle discord that wouldn’t need to be overstated. By the way, one of the great benefits of being an author is that I’m not constrained solely by writing about ethnicity. This particular story is somewhat of a departure for me in that I’ve made the character’s identity essential to the plot.

In the story, when the news of the bombing breaks, all the staff recall their memories of visiting Boston. It feels as though the city belongs to them, in a way, even though they’re not even in the same state. The narrator has never been there, but that doesn’t stop him from joining in. Why can’t he remain silent?

No doubt he feels his silence would be conspicuous. Moreover, he feels pressure (or desire) to bond with the baristas, whom he has been watching mostly from the outside. After all, he’s only been working at the coffee shop for a few weeks, one of which was spent entirely in the basement. When he makes up his stories about visiting Boston, he even acknowledges that he doesn’t feel as if he’s completely lying. He’s convinced that he’s visualizing something that could be made possible one day. It’s an indication of the impoverishment of his life, figuratively and literally, that he has never been to Boston. He has mostly led a very circumscribed experience, working from the age of sixteen in retail in a town in New England. Anyway, all of this completely backfires on him once he realizes his boss has an inkling that he’s not telling the truth. By trying to be less of an outsider, he has unwittingly placed himself under suspicion.

But some of my decision to have him lie is more plot-based than character-based. I wanted to make sure there was enough uneasiness in that scene so that when the name Tamerlan is mentioned on the TV for the very first time, it would land with sufficient emotional power. Tamerlan and the owner are both suddenly on edge. If the owner suspects Tamerlan’s made up this story, what else does the owner suspect about him? Does he lie and also steal? When Tamerlan is finally fired in the basement, I wanted there to be multiple reasons that he could begin trying to sort out later in the unemployment office. To put it another way, I needed to create something in Tamerlan’s character to help move the story forward.

The question of who took the tip jar is a whodunnit in a coffee shop, as the narrator notes. We never learn the answer to that. Instead, we follow Tamerlan’s quest for justice. He visits the office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to file a complaint for unlawful termination. The more he describes the events in the coffee shop to the counsellor, the more convinced he is of his case. Is Tamerlan sure this is because of his name and the identity it suggests?

This remains the unanswered question of the story: Is his accusation true or not? It remains unanswered for Tamerlan, as well. As far as I can tell, the only indication of doubt is when he admits in the final scene in the conference room to having some regret for having put the owner (actually the manager, he learns) through all of this. Beyond that, he’s motivated by pure self-interest. The case counsellor says he believes Tamerlan’s version of events, but that might just be the result of his understanding that he can easily settle the matter to the satisfaction of all the parties, i.e., by having the owner of the coffee shop cut a check for eight hundred dollars. In any case, I wanted the readers to be left wondering what is true. Perhaps we should take the manager at his word when he claims that he dismissed Tamerlan simply because it was the end of the spring semester. Or maybe Tamerlan is correct in sensing that there was more to it than that, and it was not a mere coincidence that he was fired right after the Boston bombing. We know that Tamerlan has been led to this conclusion out of some necessity. The truth in this story seems to be elusive and unknowable, and this circles back to your earlier question about what kind of assumptions are made about people with names like Saïd or Tamerlan. I think it’s equally fair to ask what kinds of assumptions are made by people with names like Saïd or Tamerlan.

Do you have any idea where your narrator might be now, in 2026? Will Tamerlan still be working as a barista, do you think, or will he have moved on? Will he have managed to visit Boston for real?

Maybe he has used some of that eight hundred dollars to visit Boston. I hope so. I’m rooting for him. But, honestly, I don’t know what he’s doing now. It takes everything I have to imagine what my characters’ lives are inside the story that I’m writing—I don’t have the mental capacity to consider anything after the final word. What’s paramount for me is that the readers will care about what happens next for the narrator. I purposely left the final line of the story a bit open-ended. “We hope this will make you whole,” the case counsellor says to him. Emphasis on “hope” and “will.” It remains to be seen (or wondered about) if he is made whole. Having said that, things were very much heading in a positive direction for Tamerlan in 2013. He’d landed a job at Starbucks and had already been promoted to shift supervisor. Thirteen years later, maybe he’s even become a district manager. In the final moment, he ruminates on how Starbucks is coming and how it’s “going to swallow everything.” This might sound ominous to the reader, but he’s a part of Starbucks now. A related question to wonder about might be what happens next to the manager.

As you’ve described in your 2010 memoir, “When Skateboards Will Be Free,” your father was Iranian and your mother American, and both were committed members of the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. Your father left the family home when you were nine months old, and he eventually returned to Iran, but you were never able to visit him there. When you were a child, the Iranian hostage crisis dominated the news. Now, the war that the U.S. and Israel have been pursuing with Iran means that the relationship between America and Iran is once more at the center of global affairs. How does that make you feel?

It makes me glad that I’m not ten years old again and living in Pittsburgh, where I grew up, having to navigate geopolitical conflicts by myself. If there were any other Iranians living in the city, I never met them. I think it’s hard for people to fathom how much animosity there was toward Iranians during the hostage crisis, certainly far more than there is now, even though we’re in a shooting war. Those four hundred and forty-four days created in me a perception of not belonging in America, where I frequently felt humiliated and threatened. It’s taken me years to be able to overcome that psychology of self-loathing and victimhood. Perhaps if my father had been a part of my life, he could have mitigated some of what I was going through. I would have at least had a positive depiction of an Iranian to counter the avalanche of negative ones. But, admittedly, I was partly responsible for what I was undergoing, specifically when I made the mistake of saying that the American hostages were, as per my mother and the Socialist Workers Party, C.I.A. agents who deserved to be captured and tried. That’s a recipe for alienation.

When I was about thirteen years old, I got into a fistfight with one of my best friends, completely unrelated to Iran or the hostage crisis, which had ended about a year earlier. There we were, in the front yard on a sunny afternoon, fuming at each other, and before I could make the first move my friend threw sand in my eyes. In my disoriented state, I was somehow able to grab him, and we wrestled briefly before he sank his teeth deep into my thigh. I released him after that, he stumbling home one way, I stumbling home the other, terrified at what had been done to my body. As he walked off, he called out to me, inexplicably, “You Iranian bitch!” Here was an injury worse than anything that could have been inflicted physically, compounded by the sad understanding that in our friendship he’d never given any indication that he’d been carrying this type of hatred toward me. Years later, I can still picture the two of us, the grief, the pain, the mutual recrimination, both of us wronged, both of us looming as a menace in each other’s minds, the latent xenophobia lying in wait, and with me staggering home with sand in my eyes and teeth marks in my leg. This is as good an analogy as any for what the last four and a half decades have been like.

But there is an interesting coda to all of this. I have recently become friends with one of the former American hostages, whom I met when he was a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, where I had gone to give a talk on, what else, being of Iranian descent. He’s in his eighties now and retired, living in New York City with his wife, who is Iranian, and he seems, miraculously, to carry no ill will toward Iran. I, on the other hand, carry a tremendous amount of guilt about the ill will that I was taught to feel toward him. Last summer, he took me to a Mets game, courtesy of Major League Baseball, which, upon the release of the American hostages, had given them tickets for life. The irony of the baseball game did not escape me, the two of us sitting next to each other, enjoying America’s pastime together, the way a father and son might do. ♦