Firoozeh Dumas Recommends

Laughter Made from Experience by Lola Gillebaard.

“The book is a collection of vignettes about one woman’s life: getting married, raising four sons, surviving breast cancer, and everything else in between,” Dumas says. “Gillebaard has a natural writing style that makes you feel like you are having coffee with a wise aunt, someone who has lived a full life and has the gift of recounting it with humor and warmth. She does not have a publicist or big publishing house promoting her book. It was one of those great finds that makes you realize that ordinary people often make the best subjects.”

Firoozeh Dumas was born in Ibadan, Iran and moved to America at the age of seven. She is the author of the memoir Funny in Farsi: Growing Up Iranian in America.