Persian Perspectives Today: Porochista Khakpour
(Shrey Chaganlal/Assistant Design director)
By Megan Vahdat
Oct. 15, 2024 10:53 a.m.
Listen to series host and podcasts contributor Megan Vahdat sit down with author Porochista Khakpour to discuss her experiences growing up Iranian in LA, her journey as a writer and her latest novel, “Tehrangeles.”
Megan Vahdat: I’m Megan Vahdat, and this is Persian Perspectives Today, a podcast that explores the viewpoints of Iranian leaders in arts, science, education, and politics in the UCLA community and beyond. Today, I am joined by Porochista Khakpour. Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran and raised in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley. She’s the author of several books, including “Sons and Other Flammable Objects” and “The Last Illusion.” You may know her from her collection of essays, “Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity.” Her widely acclaimed third book, “Sick: A Memoir,” was the best book of 2018 according to Time Magazine and many others. Her most recent book, “Tehrangeles,” came out in June 2024 and was an Indie Next Pick, an NPR Book of the Day, one of Time Magazine’s 25 Most Anticipated Books of 2024, as well as one of the best books of 2024 by Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and more. Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts Award. Her other writing has appeared in many sections of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Ms. Khakpour.
Porochista Khakpour: Thank you so much for having me.
MV: Many of us know you from the unique way you articulate this complicated feeling of growing up Iranian in LA. In your works, you’ve described yourself as “an infant of the Islamic Revolution and a toddler of the Iran-Iraq War.” To start off today’s interview, I wanted to ask, how do you feel your culture and your journey to the U.S. informs your writing?
PK: Well, it’s sort of hard to divide that from me as a human being, right? So, like, I think a lot of people these days think of identity as this additional layer that we tap into, almost like—well, the people that are against us think of it as a gimmick that we use, that we are latching onto identity as a way to sell ourselves, to sell a product, to sell books, whatever it is. And I don’t really see it that way. I think it’s hard, especially for Iranian-Americans, to get away from issues of identity. I mean, we didn’t choose this, but we’re on the news pretty much every night, if not every week. I mean, I’m turning 47 in a few months, and I would say my entire life, my identity has been a major subject in this country. And actually, I wish it was not. I imagine for people who don’t have that, that life must be so much more carefree and effortless. It must be great. I really can’t imagine it, but I feel that if you are an Iranian-American writer, or maybe any Iranian writer, let’s say in the West—or honestly, we could take this any place, right? If you’re Iranian, in Iran or in any diaspora, there’s no way that you can really escape from politics or issues of identity. So for me, when I was a lot younger—and I’m sort of one of those writers who started very, very early—I mean, I was already publishing in magazines and newspapers when I was in my late teens, and then I published my first novel at 29, so it’s been a long road. But I will tell you, there were times I was very frustrated with it, and I was like, “Let me write about anything else, let me find any subject but this one.” And it would just inevitably come to me. People would often write me and ask me to write about it, and sometimes I’d be very annoyed about being pigeonholed. But as I get older, I start to think, well, better we talk about it than other people, right? Better it comes from us, because people will inevitably get the information they want, and there’s so much misinformation and disinformation in our communities that it’s better it comes from us. Do I imagine a future where I could talk about aspects of Persian culture or any aspects of my identity that aren’t linked to some of the more dire things that we see on the news? Sure. That would be amazing. I think of my grandmothers—I would love to have the last few decades of my life resemble theirs. But the world we’re in right now, I think we have—I don’t want to say an obligation, but something close. I feel, at least me as an elder right now, has to do that work so that the world is better for you young people, right? I think about that a lot. I don’t have my own children—I wanted to, and it didn’t work out for me—but I think about that quite a lot. And I think that Gen X needs to step up and actually be the elders. And we hesitated with that a little bit, but I think we have to.
MV: I think for many of us who are looking for a form of representation through writing, turning to your works has been a way to be seen through literature that we often don’t experience. You have been able to take control over a narrative that is often discussed by people who aren’t from Iranian backgrounds and because of that, discussed inaccurately. And I think many of us feel that. And I wonder, how did you discover that you had a unique perspective on this that so many others who aren’t Iranian would find meaningful as well? Was your talent nurtured by a particular mentor? Did you read someone else’s work who inspired you?
PK: Well, this is such a great question, so there’s a multi-tiered answer. Many great American thinkers inspired me. I talk often about James Baldwin and encountering his work at a very young age and how influential that was for me. Then later, Audre Lorde—there are so many amazing Black American thinkers in particular that just blew my mind at a really young age, and in the ’90s we were in this incredible moment where multiculturalism was so exciting, and everybody wanted to read everything. The online world was still new; it wasn’t as hostile. There was almost a moment in time where counterculture was kind of trendy, or subcultures, right? It looked cool if you were at a coffee shop with a stack of books. I feel very lucky to have come of age in that era where there was a lot of interest about being Iranian, about Muslim culture. When I was in elementary school, I was already an activist. This is thanks to my dad—and this is the other prong of the response. I was very lucky to have the sort of dad I have, but he was dragging me to protests when I was very young, and honestly too young in many ways. I think many parents would say that was way too young. But, when I was nine years old, I was at the federal building here in Los Angeles, very close to UCLA, and I watched Neusha Farrahi self-immolate. That’s a lot for a nine-year-old, right? That was 1987, and that really changed me. I started getting very interested in our activist cultures, but also every activist culture, so that by the time I was in junior high, I was already identifying pretty strongly with activism, and I knew that was the area that I wanted in my life. I also knew I wanted to be a journalist. I also knew I wanted to be a novelist. It’s sort of interesting—I’m living the life I dreamed of as a child. And I think part of the reason I got to that is because it really seemed against all odds. It seemed impossible. We lived in a tiny apartment building on the eastside of LA in the San Gabriel Valley. South Pasadena has many nice, affluent areas, but we were in this apartment district called Raymond Hill on the border of Pasadena. It’s a place I would love to live now. I think it’s gotten much more expensive—it’s pretty hard to get in there—but it wasn’t a nice neighborhood then. There were a lot of problems, a lot of police in the neighborhood, a lot of conflicts. And the apartment—my parents, bless them, made the space as nice as they could, but it was not a nice place. I had a very small room that I shared with my brother. I knew that we were in a lower-income bracket, and I knew that a lot of Iranians weren’t. So for me, I thought, what could I do so that I could have a voice? I already had some idea of the minority cultures that my parents were part of, and I already had some idea that minority cultures among Iranians were just as oppressed as in Western cultures, right? I think one of the best things about being Iranian is how beautiful it is, all the minority cultures we have in this giant country. But I was already hearing all sorts of levels of bigotry from people in our communities, even some relatives. I was very sensitive to that stuff, so I felt that counter-narratives were very important, or else everybody would have thought that every Iranian on this planet is low-key racist, low-key misogynistic. And I didn’t want that. I could tell that there was a 1% Tehrangeles community that was, perhaps in their desire for assimilation, trying so hard to identify with the worst of white people, basically, in California, and I didn’t want any part of that. I knew there was a very different story. I knew that there were more Iranians who lived very differently. So that gave me a sense of urgency. I knew I probably couldn’t survive in California at that point. There weren’t as many writers back then—writing mostly meant screenwriting back then. So I really wanted to get to New York. I got a scholarship, went to Sarah Lawrence—which was, at that point, known as one of the most expensive schools in the country. So I was like, wow, very out of my element there. I had really amazing mentors and really amazing internships. I took advantage of New York City and all its opportunities, and I was just very focused. There’d been a set of experiences that had really changed my life, from that protest I just told you about to things like the LA riots—that was a big one for me—all the way to 9/11. You have to look at your own timeline as a human being and sort of the events that defined you. Certainly, the last few years’ events have shaped a lot of us. It helped me get a sense of how I was going to center myself in these conversations, if that makes sense, or find my center in these conversations. It’s difficult, and I don’t think I had a natural sense of what modality I was going to use. Was it going to be satire? Was it going to be creative nonfiction? But I knew that I would love to write, and I knew that I wanted change, and I knew that—I felt, maybe a little arrogantly as a young person—that my perspective was worthwhile.
MV: Not many people can say that they realized all of the dreams they had as a young child and at such a young age. You said that you, as a young child, wanted to be a novelist. You wanted to be an essayist. You had these various different literary genres you wanted to publish in. And I think many of us are impressed by the versatility of your writing. You published a memoir, Sick, which details your experiences with chronic illness. You’re an essayist—your collection of essays, “Brown Album,” was published in 2020. And now you’ve just published a fictional work, “Tehrangeles,” which you alluded to, and it’s just come out. I was wondering, can you tell us a little bit about the book, your motivations behind writing it, and how fiction enables you to address the subjects the novel covers?
PK: Well, thank you for that question. You’d be surprised, because I’m probably even more versatile than you think, because I’ve had a lot of ghostwriting projects, and nobody ever knows. I have NDAs on some of those projects, so I’m probably writing more than people realize. It’s nonstop. I have certain luxuries. One big luxury is, it’s just me and my dog. I have partners here and there, and relationships, but I’m unmarried, I don’t have children, so I can kind of do what I want. I have that level of freedom. I don’t want to say that all single people can do everything they want—I’ve had chronic illness and disability that has definitely held me back at times—but for the most part, my entire life is reading and writing, and that is the life I dreamed of as a child. I believe so strongly in art. I wish there were other arts I was talented at, because in many ways, I wish I could do another form of art. Words are very difficult. They demand a lot of us. No matter what you choose not to say, others aren’t, but when I was very disabled, there was a point at which I really couldn’t put together a sentence, but I could take photos with a camera or with my iPhone. I kept thinking, I wish I could do that. I’ve thought about this issue a lot—being disabled and maybe becoming a drone pilot one day. There are really artistic things people can do with drones, but it’s true—it is pretty difficult to, at a young age, think, I want to do this thing, and then just go for it. I can tell you, most people who’ve worked with me, whether they’re agents or editors or colleagues, would say I’m probably one of the most persistent people they’ve ever met. I don’t give up. I’m at a fellowship right now here in Italy—this amazing room I’m in is in a 15th-century castle. I got into this residency in 2016. And then in 2018, I was too ill to come here. I had a portable oxygen concentrator back then—I was very sick. And then I made sure I got back on the list, and I got in in 2024. I actually realized the other day I technically got in in 2013—that was when I was first invited. I’m going to another residency in a few months at MacDowell, and I’ve been applying to that residency since 2006, and I just got in this past year. Now, most of my students would have given up after a few times. They would be like, “I’m done. I’ve been rejected too many times.” But I am very, very, very persistent. And for all the successes I’ve had, I can’t tell you how many rejections I still get to this day. It’s constant. But for whatever reason, my wiring is such that I just keep going, and I don’t let it get to me. There’s an attitude here, too—I don’t think everything I’ve written is perfect. I’m a book critic—that’s another thing I do quite often. I’m working on a book review right now for The Washington Post. I’ve written a lot of book criticism. If you gave me my current book, “Tehrangeles,” and had me write criticism on it, I would give it a mixed review, probably, and people are surprised to hear that. But I don’t believe in perfect books. I don’t believe in perfect art. I do think I’ve written a pretty interesting book that has some real merits, but if I could do another five drafts of it, I would. And part of it is that I’m not on my own timeline. You work with major publishers, you’re on their timeline. You have to make certain compromises. I had a different ending at one point, but my editor wanted another one. My training in journalism really helped me with that—to think in terms of a team and to think in terms of compromise with my work. I think that’s a good quality to have as a writer. Perhaps at times, I should be even more protective of my work and take a stronger stand, but I really believe in collaboration. I also am a contributing editor at Evergreen Review. I love the collaborative process of working with writers, so I have my hands in every aspect of the written arts. Now I’m doing some screenwriting. There’s a lot going on, and there’s always a ton more going on. With writers, it’s like we come out with a book, and people don’t realize we’ve been working on that for years, and it’s been going through all sorts of hands—copy editors, all sorts of things. These are long processes. So I find it pretty exciting to have a day where I can compartmentalize aspects of different writing throughout the day. I think that’s kind of a dream. I remember somebody tried to insult me a few years ago. They said, “You just want to live like a grad student your whole life.” And I said, “Yeah, I do. I actually do.” And I realized my father’s like that too. Going back to my issue with my father,, I had a father who was a tremendous nerd. He was one of the top math students in Iran—he was ranked nationally, and he got to MIT as a scholarship student in the ’60s. It took him a very long time to get his PhD, but he was very persistent. He did. He didn’t have any language skills or anything like that, so he really built himself from scratch there. My father’s brilliant at chess. My father, on his own, translates Middle Persian all the time—there’s only a handful of people who do this on Earth. So in our household, even though we didn’t have a lot of money, my dad would go to the library. Do you know in libraries they often have a section where they sell books, like used books? He would just bring cartons of those home. So we had National Geographics, we had encyclopedias—all used—but we just had books everywhere, and that was our joy. The darker side of things was that my dad didn’t really allow me to go to slumber parties or have fun like a lot of kids did, but I didn’t really care that much, because I was like, wait a sec, if I stay home, there are all these books. Later, there was a computer and the Internet, and I could go online. In the mid-’90s, I was already in chat rooms talking to people in New York about the arts. It was very pure back then—I wasn’t trying to meet people. There were some weird things that happened, but mostly it was learning about, wow, museums and galleries and movements and the arts. I was focused on that stuff. As I got older, I realized there were more people in my family than I knew who were creative, but they were never given a chance to exercise that creativity, like my grandmothers. I think that’s why they were always rooting for me so much to live the life that I wanted, whereas my parents were like, “Oh, I should just get married and have kids.” And they were like, “No, no, let her work the way she wants.”
MV: It’s interesting that it’s often the women who didn’t experience that life who encourage academic pursuit, maybe more so than the stereotypical perceptions of what a Middle Eastern woman should be in Iranian culture. And you’ve mentioned very often that you feel you don’t resonate with this sort of stereotypical Shahs of Sunset-type Tehrangelino. You’ve alluded to that in this interview—that you feel like you had a very different childhood than media depictions of how Iranian Americans in LA grew up. Your book, Tehrangeles, is this satirical work that focuses on stereotypical Iranian Americans living in, as you describe, glitz and glamor. I wonder, as an author, is it difficult to put yourself in the shoes of and write so personally about these stereotypical Iranian Americans? What have you learned from writing about experiences that are so different from your own?
PK: That was, again, a great question. My first book was very different. I did a reading recently in New York, and there was a brilliant young Iranian woman at the end who asked, “Why are you writing about this Tehrangeles world? Why didn’t you write about a world closer to you?” And I said, I did. It was my first novel. My first novel was a father-son story, though, so I think a lot of people didn’t see me in it, but there was a lot of me in it, and it was very much the apartment complex I grew up in. When I do book reviews of writers or think about writers, I look at their whole body of work. I’m really fascinated by that. So I think of my own writing like that too—I imagine a whole body of work. These days, I think, how many more books do I have in me? And I sort of like to plot it out. Obviously, that’s going to change—writers always change their minds—but I knew at some point I wanted to write a book about this world, because I had been a shop girl on Rodeo Drive, and I had some of the wildest experiences there at this little boutique across the street from the Bijan store. We got a lot of Iranians who came in. I was really, at times, wounded by their response when they realized that I was Iranian. I would want to always be like, “Salaam,” trying to talk in my Persian, very eager. You love to see your fellow countrymen, and they would often be so embarrassed that I was on the other side of the counter. You know how some rich Iranians are—they don’t mind our feelings. They would just be like, “What happened? Why are you the shop girl?” They really had no conception of Iranians working in these jobs. I was just like, nothing happened. At that point, I’d also been to grad school—I went to grad school very early—I have a degree from Johns Hopkins. They would be mortified like something really horrible must have happened in my life to make me a shop girl. And I’d be like, I’m an artist. This is normal. But I would still have really hurt feelings. I even remember that feeling from when we were kids and we would go to the Tehrangeles neighborhood, right into Westwood, right where UCLA is, and we’d go to Shamshiri or Darya. All these wonderful restaurants are still my favorites—I love going there. But occasionally we would get some looks. Whenever this happens to other people, I always make sure to smile at the family, because occasionally you’ll get a family that comes in that’s not as well-dressed, that doesn’t have the optics of that world. And you’ll see some of these elders looking at them with that snobbery that we sometimes have. I would always notice it as a child, and it would really upset me. Even when my dad had this great interest in Zoroastrianism, and we’d go to the Zartoshti Temple in Westminster, there’d be families there who would do the same thing to us. So I became very class-conscious. When we were shopping around, my second novel, “The Last Illusion,” which has a lot of Shahnameh in it and is sort of like a fabulous thriller about the Zaal character, it was not easy to sell that book. My first book was much easier to sell because it was a much more realist story about an Iranian father and an Iranian-American son. But when we were shopping around “The Last Illusion,” it took two and a half years to sell that book—it was excruciating. So I started a file in my computer that was a parody of a lot of these editors’ requests, and they all seemed to want a book about Iranian American women only. At that point, I was publishing a lot of essays in The New York Times and publications like that, so they were seeing my name everywhere. And I was like, what—you just want stories about Iranian American women? They kind of wanted a memoir from me, I could tell, but I wasn’t wanting to write a memoir at that point at all. It wasn’t until later, when I wrote more about illness, that I wanted to write a memoir. But at that point, I was like, no, what are they actually saying? I started to realize a lot of these older editors wanted things that were closer to the generation above me’s writing, which were these much more traditional tales of exile from Iran. A lot of it had veered into trauma porn, thanks to horrible movies like “Not Without My Daughter.” Again, I’m not blaming these writers for their work, but I’m blaming the industry for how they were trying to see Iranian women. And I was like, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to write those stories. I was only in Iran for the first few years of my life—I don’t have a ton of firsthand experience of Iran. So I thought, what could I write about Iranian women? It’s about Iranian women in the diaspora. That’s when I was like, I need to write a Tehrangeles-type book. I wrote so many drafts of this book since 2011. It was right before Shahs of Sunset came out. I have an essay that’s the beginning of my book Brown Album about Shahs of Sunset, and that ran in The New York Times in 2012. I talk about working on a book about the first Iranian reality TV family at a time of war with Iran, which is what Tehrangeles was going to be. But it wasn’t until the early pandemic that I thought, wait a sec, we have an even better setting here. This is the most madcap setting of all. There was just so much that pertained to Iran in that period, because if you’ll remember, in January it looked very likely that we could go to war with Iran after the Soleimani assassination. Then suddenly the pandemic happens. So I thought this could be a very interesting setup for a book. These very affluent daughters are kind of based on Little Women, but also have Kardashian-ish aspirations. I thought, they’re all trapped together—let me really explore the characters deeply and see where we can go with this. I think through each of them, I got to explore a different type of Iranian diaspora female archetype. There’s one who I think is wonderful—and I’m biased, because Mina is very much like me and some of my dearest Gen Z friends. And then the other ones are different levels of problematic. But I thought, we need to write about it. I really believe in writing satire that has some heart to it. To what degree am I going to rescue these young people? But part of them being Gen Z made that a lot easier, and me being a lot older made that easier, because I actually do believe in young people being able to change and improve their lives. So I had a sort of maternal feeling, even though there are a couple characters who do some really horrible things that I will never sign off on. But it was the right book for the right time. I’m glad I didn’t write it earlier—I needed to sit with it. I needed TikTok to exist so I could spend hours a day researching.
MV: And I think, as a Middle Eastern woman, you’re especially sensitive to the danger of a negative stereotype. You wrote about it in “Brown Album” — your experiences after 9/11, when there was this increase in fear of Middle Eastern people following the incident. As a writer, how do you make sure that you don’t further perpetuate these negative stereotypes about Iranian Americans when you’re writing about these characters and people who aren’t Iranian are being exposed to them?
PK: I think that’s another amazing question. I think that’s a very difficult subject that only certain marginalized people ever have to think about. It’s so interesting—it’s like we have this additional burden. So you have to consider: to what degree is it your responsibility to put out work that rounds up, that’s almost aspirational and is a form of activism? Or to what degree do you say, let’s face it, these are our problems, and if we don’t look at this as it is, we’re not going to move past it? I kept going back and forth between these two modalities. I kept thinking, what am I doing? I don’t want to create something that’s going to make people just hate Iranians. I don’t want people to read these the wrong way. So again, it really had to cook over time, because some people read it and they’re like, “Why did it take you that long to write? It was a page-turner.” Thank you for that comment, but the reason I had to sit with it is precisely because of these issues. How do you create characters that say racist things at times, or just very bigoted things, or have this delusional view that their money could protect them from everything? How do you do that and still have a conscience? For me, a lot of the problems with the Mirani family are American problems—they’re actually not Iranian problems. I believe if they had all grown up in Iran, they wouldn’t have had some of the issues they had. So I think America is the problem in the book, and it’s what poisons them in many ways, and our current American culture in particular. They all have different relationships with the idea of Iran and the potential of going back to Iran. The parents were interesting anchors for me. On one hand, you have the dad, who is just obsessed with assimilating at whatever cost—he doesn’t even care. And then you have Homa, the mother, who I really love. She’s really complicated, and her depression has been eating her, and she just doesn’t want to be part of a reality TV show. She doesn’t love the hijinks of her kids. But every single character in that book, I think—even Mina Milani, who I think is as close to a good person as there is in the book—every single one of them has a serious flaw. Every single one of them does something wrong. I think that’s the truth for all of us. We’re so eager to be accepted and to say that we’re good, but I think there’s something liberating in admitting one’s own personal flaws and shortcomings, as well as our people’s shortcomings. Every culture has that. Every subculture has it. For me, that became more important. There are issues in the book about Iranian anti-Blackness. We really have to talk about that—it’s been an issue for a long time, and it manifests in all sorts of ways. It’s all of our problem—it absolutely has to be. Iran is a big country, like the U.S., and so often, so much doesn’t get spoken about. I think of my Kurdish friends who are so hurt with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and Iranians not acknowledging them enough. To me, they were the centerpiece of it—Jina Mahsa Amini being Kurdish. How can people even erase the word “Jina” from her name? It’s such a heartbreak, and instead use the government name. I think there are certain things that all Iranians really do have in common, and it’s important to stay focused on that. We all know that the regime in Iran is—I can’t even say the word I want to say out loud. I’m sure you can imagine. But they are one of the worst authoritarian regimes of all time. I think every Iranian I know, at least, is anti-regime. With these commonalities, there’s a lot of other things that one has to untangle and face. I don’t think I have one single strategy, but again, it kind of goes back to the body of work and all these other things I do, and the constant dialogues I have with young people and older people. We’re a fairly young diaspora. I did have some relatives who were here earlier, but when you have a young diaspora, a lot of this stuff is still kind of percolating, and people are trying to figure it out. I think the sad part is that there’s a lot of fighting in our diaspora cultures and a lot of misunderstanding, and there has to be some way to move past it so that we can have some unity, and some healthy cultural pride—not superiority, not supremacy, but healthy cultural pride.
MV: Well, I wanted to thank you so much for joining us today, Ms. Khakpour. I think all of our readers, despite being repulsed by some of the characters you write about and their fatal flaws, feel the style of your writing promotes a feeling of kinship with them, where we can relate to certain aspects of their identity and empathize with them—characters who you could never imagine you’d resonate with.
PK: Yeah, that’s how I felt with Roxanna and Haley. Every time I would come to write their scenes, I would just be like, get me out of here. I really had to think like being a mother, like Homa or even Mina at times, and be like, how can I wrap my head around these people? Haley says some of the most horrible things. But again, I feel like Haley’s poisoned by conservative aspects of this culture, especially in that period. She kind of can’t help herself. But I think more than anything, in everything I do, including the memoir I have on illness and disability, honesty is a really big one for me.
MV: And you write so vulnerably in all of your work and so honestly, and I think that speaks to so many of us here at UCLA and beyond who are really moved by your work and your writing.
PK: Thank you so much. I know it’s such a hard time to be a student and all that, but it’s really important to fight toxic powers that are out there, to stand strong, to fight bigotry of all sorts, and to really stand with your communities and be honest with yourselves and your friends and family and just do your best. Our cultures will constantly be tested—it’s not going to be over anytime soon. We’ve got to be in it for life, especially if we’re going to stay in this country. But again, everywhere you go, there you are, right? So you can’t run away from the self, and we have been tasked with a complicated identity.
MV: Thank you so much again for sharing your perspective with our audience. We really appreciate your time.
This episode of Persian Perspectives Today was brought to you by Daily Bruin Podcasts. You can listen to this episode and all other Daily Bruin podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. The audio and transcript of today’s interview are available at dailybruin.com. I’m Megan Vahdat – thank you for listening.