A comprehensive report on Marsha’s mysterious death, written by Mr Cahal Milmo was published on the second of January 2015 by UK Independent. 

“The mystery of Marsha Mehran: The best-selling young novelist who died a recluse in a rubbish-strewn cottage on Ireland’s west coast”

According to this report, Marsha Mehran chose to be alone, cutting from the world in order to dedicate all her time to writing. for example, on a note on the door she wrote:“Do not disturb. I’m working.” And on a yellow Post It which I have in my possession, Marsha wrote “…Do not knock, I am working.”

This shows how mush she cut off with the outside world in order to work on her last two unfinished books: Pistachio Rain and The Margaret Thatcher School of Beauty. Even she neglected her health; she continued to work while she was vomiting blood, and did not go to doctor or seek help until the sickness took over her body and mind and led to her death.

However, as Mr Cahal Milmo wrote in his report, “The real reasons for her demise lie in an extraordinary story of globetrotting exile, passion and ultimately a search for identity that brought Marsha to unkempt hermitude in the westernmost limits of Europe, and an untimely death.”

Marsha was vivacious, full of life. However, the prevailing human conditions affected her, as affect all of us. In her case, parent divorce, her own divorce, social commitments and struggle to comply with, loneliness, and above all separation from her beloved country, America, due to her application for permanent residency been rejected despite her being legally married with an Irish American, and despite her being previously a permanent resident (which had been taken away from her by force and when she was still a minor and alone at an immigration department close to the Canadian border). Marsha was victim of injustice and cruelty of the Immigration Department of United State of America. While America houses millions of criminals, drug dealers, illegal immigrants, and false refugees, it could not find a place for a gifted brilliant bestseller author. I know how much she suffered; she cried, she moaned, she sobbed, and she suffered.

She lived eight of her teenage years in America. She was identified as a gifted child and was studying under a special educational program for exceptional children. She called America home. In an article, titled The Long Way Home, in the New York Time Magazine in 2005, she wrote:

“Christopher (her husband) and I lived for two years in a cottage in the west of Ireland. But now our days abroad are over, and we’re back in the United States. We have settled in Brooklyn, where, of all the places I’ve been, I feel most myself. I understand Brooklyn in my bones: the juxtaposition of so many voices, so many souls, so many foods, so many cultures. It is in this most American of cities that I have chosen to set down roots — because it seems to me no other place better embodies the world.”  And she was kicked from her home.

Yes, the rejection of her application was the beginning step to her demise. She became lonely wanderer, a vagabond. Travelling and living temporarily in America, Ireland and Australia. I have noticed that she has been identified as “Iranian writer” , Iranian American writer, America writer, Iranian Irish writer, or variations of Identities.

She loved American people and wanted to write about America and Americans the way she perceived them – her own contemporary version of Mark Twain’s understanding of American. Finally she became a nowhere and everywhere writer.

In Australia it is too soon for her to be called an Australian writer; not even a descent report of her death was published in Australian media. Of course if she had become a “celebrity”, she could have been known as Australian.

In Iranian she has been condemned to have been born in a Baha’i family. Ironically, her parents, even before Marsha was born, had discontinued their adherence to Baha’i religion, and Marsha was never raised as a Baha’i, or as a matter of fact, any religion. She was free to accept or reject any religion. We did not want to impose our belief upon our children.

As Mr Milmo has quoted from Mr Collins,  ‘Marsha spent her life looking for a home. She had no country; no real home for so many years.’

Perhaps, Mr Milmo is right when he wrote that Marsha ” had at last found somewhere that she called home…In Irelan”. Ireland never rejected her.