“Every morning some Iranian housewife wakes up, eats breakfast and decides to write a memoir about it,” Gina Nahai, 46, says without malice. She’s only explaining why, when so much of her writing is based on true-life characters and their experiences, including her own, she chooses fiction. “Who the hell wants to hear my story?” she elaborates. “I’m irrelevant in the grand scheme of things... maybe if I were Mahatma Gandhi....”

Nahai’s fourth novel, Caspian Rain, in which a teenage girl attempts to change her destiny by marrying up and out of the Jewish ghetto in Tehran, is coming in September from MacAdam/Cage. Sitting on the patio of the green room at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, where she’s speaking on a panel, Nahai is animated but nonchalant. Truth is clearly less interesting to her than fiction because, she insists, truth is nearly always more incredible than anything she could make up. “The whole premise of Caspian Rain is the question of, how do you deal with loss,” she says. “Americans have the expression to make lemonade out of lemons, but in the east, loss becomes part of our identity. We either hide it or we are lessened by it. Your children inherit your shame.” She says she suffered devastating loss in her 30s and couldn’t move on, but she won’t be specific, except to explain that writing Caspian Rain was her way of learning to accept and overcome. She will tell you story after story with infectious excitement but the emotional landscapes are reserved for the page.

Her résumé is interesting enough to mine for fiction: born in Tehran in the time of the Shah, part of the Iranian Jewish community, she left at 13 for a girls’ boarding school in Switzerland that catered to the daughters of wealthy Saudis, Kuwaitis and South Americans. When she was 16, her family immigrated and settled in California, where Nahai earned a master’s degree in international relations from U.C.L.A. and ended up in law school. “Because I wanted a career but didn’t think about being a writer, especially as a woman. It seemed all the writers I studied in Western literature were depressed and alcoholic. The Persian woman poets I knew about? There were two and both committed suicide!” She found the law interesting, but left after a year. She would much rather tell about growing up with her grandfather, who in the early 1900s got permission to take a second wife from his first wife, who was unable to have children. The lucky (or unlucky as it turned out) woman was an adventurous Roman Catholic Parisian who agreed to the match because she thought it would be an exciting way to see another part of the world. Nahai shakes her head. “It was a bad idea, but once she got there, she couldn’t leave.”

Nahai’s first novel, Cry of the Peacock (Crown, 1991), follows seven generations of an Iranian-Jewish family, their history narrated from prison by a 116-year-old woman named Peacock. Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (Harcourt, 1999) begins in Tehran’s Jewish ghetto and ends up in California. “This is the book I will see people reading on a train,” Nahai says. (Incidentally, she adds, “all the runaway women in the book are my mother’s aunts. And the opium addict? One of my kosher grandmother’s brothers...”). “Moonlight did really well. It was on the L.A. Times bestseller list and because of that I sold the next one, Sunday’s Silence, for a lot of money without writing a line.”

Nahai, whose books have been translated into 16 languages, hopes she is “telling the stories of people whose stories would otherwise not be told, people who are not necessarily significant in the public sense,” and she writes about women because “in general, and especially in the Third World, they live and die these lives and no one takes any notice.” Nahai’s work aims to change that, and if you’ve got a tale to tell, she’s ready to listen.