In Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas has dealt with a lot of things while growing up. I could never imagine being shoved into a new place at such a young age, where making friends and fitting in can be an issue in a young girl’s life. But Throughout the book you see her making many life lessons and you see her grow through all her stories as she lets them come to life with her particular writing style. Duma’s discusses all the multiple jobs she had at the age of fourteen. From babysitting, housesitting and cleaning, a typical teenagers job. But those jobs weren’t nearly working for her and she knew she wasn’t going to get anywhere with that. She needed to make more money for she worried about how she was going to pay for college. She knew that during the Iranian evolution and knowing her parents weren’t well off that she needed to find a way to pay for college. I myself had done the same thing, working odd jobs at a young age and hating them as much as she did. Baby sitting and having the parents come home later then they promised. I even dog sat for a couple once.  

But as for Dumas she had a problem for how she was going to pay for tuition. Dumas, mentions in the story Girls Just Wanna Have Funds “my summer at the movie theater taught me one thing: I had to look for a better paying job, preferably one that didn’t involve selling jujubes” (Dumas 122-129). That’s when scholarships came, as Dumas needed to pay for tuition; I did too and had no idea how I was going to make it happen with jobs paying such little amount of money. But just as the awful jobs as Dumas had, I had them too, but had to deal with them in order to get where I am today. You see that she learned that you must do whatever it takes to get to where you want in life. Awful jobs, and essays to win scholarships, we do what we have to do in order to get where we want in life.

Another lesson I see she leaned was reading A Nose by Any other Name. Dumas talks about beauty and how her nose can be compared to the puppet “gonzo” from Sesame Street. She even admits that she almost got a nose job when she was younger. She even fixates on a librarian she used to see all the time in college and never understood how this woman with the largest ugliest nose had so much confidence in how she presented herself. Years later, as married women with children she was finally able to see that people fixate on beauty at such young ages and even recounts the time when she obsessed over Jane Fonda’s nose. She makes a very good point saying “That a nose by any other name is just a nose. It does not hold the soul for no matter how big our noses may be, our soulsare far, far, bigger”.

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