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A review of Female Life on Planet Earth follows Iranian-American woman Heti as she prepares for the anniversary of her mother's death and receives a disturbing photograph showing her mother holding an assault rifle to another woman's head. Through episodic encounters with friends, family, and strangers, the novel examines womanhood, cultural repression, lineage, and societal expectations. The review highlights the book's distinct voices, dreamlike settings, memorable characters, and insightful perspectives, while noting that its emotional distance and loosely connected structure may leave some readers wanting a stronger personal thread.
In the run-up to the anniversary of her mother’s death, Heti, an Iranian-American woman, receives a photograph from an unknown source of her mother, veiled in black, holding an assault rifle to the head of another woman.
A building burns in the background. It’s enough to throw anyone into disarray. Tasked with organising the anniversary ceremony, she now searches to reconcile the woman in the photograph with the mother she thought she knew. In the process, she will have a series of conversations with friends, family and strangers, that will answer as many questions that they raise.
And so Female Life on Planet Earth develops its structure of loosely connected episodes in which Heti encounters a memorable cast of characters ready to speak at length about life in a sometimes funny, and often thought-provoking mannner, telling personal stories that highlight and explore the complexities and contradictions of womanhood, of what is expected of them and by whom, cycles of repression perpetrated by culture, lineage and society. The voices are distinct, the settings richly rendered in a distant, dreamlike prose, and the characters Heti encounters are well drawn and memorable.
The novel is a chorus of perspectives, but Heti’s is kept at arm’s length. We don’t see what moves her from moment to moment, and the episodic structure reveals the artifice as each chapter starts and end in much the same way. Heti will meet a character, who will flood the pages with monologue that by the chapter’s end gives way to some form of enlightenment.
It is insightful to see where and to whom Heti offers her own perspective, but for much of the novel her role is that of receptacle. Her feelings about the photographs are presented in dialogue, but we are not privy to her inner reflections. It might leave readers wanting an emotional thread that would better serve the impact of the ending, which despite those qualms comes together beautifully.
When the anniversary ceremony is in full swing, Heti presents her family with the photographs of her mother. It gives way to a moving sequence of events, with each added voice lending a new perspective to a complicated historical and social tapestry where multiple truths exist side by side. Djamel White is a novelist from Dublin. His debut novel, All Them Dogs, was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026
Novel Review Womanhood Iranian-American Identity Cultural Repression Contemporary Fiction
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