How Did Mariam Grow Up In A Thousand Splendid Suns

Similar to Alvarez’s novel, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, highlights the upbringing of two young girls over two generations growing up in war-stricken Afghanistan. However, this novel emphasizes how people are sometimes forced to grow up when they may not yet be ready. Mariam is an illegitimate child of a very wealthy businessman and is told by her mother her entire life that she is not good enough and that he father does not really love her. She grows up and marries a wealthy shoe maker, suffering abuse in her marriage as well. Laila is born a generation later, next door to Mariam’s adult home and is a very privileged child, free to pursue an education and choose who she wants to marry. However, when tragedy strikes their town,

However, she was born as an accident, her mother having been a servant in her father’s house. Mariam’s mother, Nana, claimed that when she had gotten pregnant, her “own father [...] disowned her” (Hosseini 6). After Mariam comes home one day and finds Nana “dangling at the end of” (36) a rope dropped from a high tree branch, she is sent to live with her father, however temporarily and is shortly thereafter given up for marriage. This is the first instance of Mariam having to make an adult decision and being forced to grow up too quickly. Though she is just fifteen, she marries a man thirty years her senior named Rasheed. For most of the first days “Mariam stayed in bed” (62), but once those months were over, Rasheed began to become very demanding. He wanted Mariam to be his housewife and when she does not perform tasks to his liking, he severely beats her. In addition, after trying many times to have children, Mariam continues to have miscarriage after miscarriage and that puts and even bigger strain on their relationship as well as Mariam’s self esteem. Mariam is very young at this point and instead of experiencing the normalities of young adulthood, she is being forced to act as a wife just after her life is flipped upside-down and then coming to grips with her own fate for the rest of her life.. However, Rasheed is the only “family” that Mariam

She is the youngest child in the family and is very close with her father. However, her two older brothers are away fighting in the war, so Laila’s mother spends most of her days pining away for her two sons. Unlike Mariam’s childhood, Laila has very close friends, including her neighbor and best friend Tariq, and she also has the ability to go to school and be educated, something that not all females are able to do. However, the war continues to rage on in Laila’s life and she is often forced to make sure she is fed and taken care of because her mother is virtually not involved in her life. Laila acts as the mother of the household most days. From a young age, Laila had also been forced to experience all of the horrors of war first hand. Rockets rained down on Kabul, her hometown, and every time that her house and her family was safe, they had to deal with “the agony of wondering who wasn’t” safe (174). Most of Laila’s childhood was spent hearing stories about people being shot and raped in their homes, and never feeling safe, not being allowed on the street unless she is accompanied by a man. “The streets became so unsafe that Babi” Laila’s father, had her drop out of school and took on the teaching duties himself (177). The horrors go so far that Laila’s best girl friend, Giti is killed walking home from school. This was the first person “that someone whom Laila had known, been close to” and loved had died