In Mariam Rahmani’s debut novel, “Liquid,” the narrator, frustrated by single life in Los Angeles, decides to date 100 wealthy men and women over a summer in an effort to “marry rich” and solve the problems in her love life and work life. She’s two years out of graduate school and struggling to write and earn a living as an adjunct professor.

Through it all, her best friend, Adam, supports but also confounds her in a way that makes clear he’s the real answer she is looking for. Halfway through the book, the unnamed narrator — whose parents were immigrants from Iran and India — must go to Tehran after her father, who long ago moved back to Iran, has a heart attack. The book, which had already been exploring the immigrant-as-outsider experience, shifts in tone in this second half as Rahmani explores what it’s like for a character who is now slowly realizing she may not feel perfectly at home anywhere.

In a recent video interview, Rahmani said the book delves into American and British classic novels (and “When Harry Met Sally ...”), racism in America and Iran, the cultural differences between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and how she sees a similarity between arranged marriages and the way the wealthy send their children to elite colleges to manage their dating pool.

Still, Rahmani strives to keep the book entertaining, to “explain without making the reader feel like they’re receiving an explanation.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Did you look at this as a story about romance and love, and everything else lends heft, or is it a story about immigration and bifurcated identity and the romance lends lightness to that?

A: I love that you put it that way. It’s absolutely both. There’s an attempt to be literary fiction, not pure romance. The part of me that is more analytic due to my Ph.D. in comparative literature certainly identifies with that and having this be a way to explore a complicated and intricate cultural phenomenon. There’s also a real celebration of femininity throughout. But that’s not where I started. Primarily, my interest was, how do I write a love story? That was the challenge to myself from the beginning.

I have a lot of different interests and sometimes I get bored with my own self, so in writing, I’m interested in setting myself challenges, questions that were almost like dares: How smart can a rom-com get? That was really a driver. And because that’s the genre, how do you get a reader to stay with you and feel the emotional impact of a foregone conclusion? Everybody knows the ending of a romance. You can tell within two pages that the two characters are going to end up together, so I was really interested in what outside the plot can surprise and create an emotional investment.

Q: Since you feel the viewers know the outcome on some level, did you purposely write it so the narrator doth protest too much when it comes to her best friend and the fact that they’re just friends?

A: My assumption was that readers would see through her. And I thought that was pretty funny — she thinks she’s so smart and she is acting so stupid on this really obvious thing. She is also a little holier than thou, so I really wanted to give the reader that power of seeing through her.

I was also flipping the power dynamic: She often orchestrates what’s going on, but then there are these huge ways she’s tripping up, which is where the humor comes from, but where there are actually larger emotional repercussions to it for her.

Q: Was it also important to you that she’s a sexually open (and promiscuous) character who also happens to be Muslim?

A: I grew up very differently than the narrator in a lot of ways, but what was important to me politically was complicating our images of who is a Muslim woman in America and making space for them all, even within the same person. There was a period where she wore a hijab. And there’s this period now where, by a lot of Muslim standards, she would be considered heretical. But there’s this culture of secular Islam that has existed for centuries, but that has been a bit lost in recent history, where you can embrace the emotions of being Muslim without practicing it to the letter.

She also has a different entry point into Iran than I’ve had. But a lot of folks in the U.S. who have immigrant parents might feel this way, with that sense of simultaneous belonging and alienation that people feel when they go on these trips back home … but it’s not their home. I was interested in that friction and energy, which is both good and it’s bad.

Q: Writers often say the town or city they’re writing about is a character. But in this book, L.A. felt like it was a half-dozen different characters as the narrator travels all over the city. How conscious were you of geography as character and of L.A. being this sprawling entity with different possibilities?

A: I think of the novel as a love letter to L.A. There are a lot of ways in which I don’t identify with the narrator, but in my love for Los Angeles, certainly I do. One of the things that makes it so special is it’s so many different cities in one, so many different worlds. There are doors ajar for ways of life that I think are found in few other American cities, if at all. That’s changing, of course, as it gentrifies, but for now, the different personalities you see in the novel are what I think is great about the city.