Things I've Been Silent About; Memories

New York: Random House, 2008. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xxi, [1], 336, [8] pages. Illustrations. Suggested Reading List. Moments in Twentieth-Century Iranian History. Glossary. Signed by author in English and Farsi on t-p. From Wikipedia: Azar Nafisi (born ca. 1947, is an Iranian academic and bestselling writer who has resided in the United States since 1997 when she emigrated from Iran. Her field is English language literature. Nafisi's 2003 book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books has been translated into 32 languages. It was on the New York Times Bestseller list for 117 weeks, and has won numerous literary awards, including the 2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense, and the Europe based Persian Golden Lioness Award for literature. [3][4] The book also led to controversy about Nafisi's alleged connections to neoconservatism and colonialism. She published an autobiography, Things I've been silent about: memories of a prodigal daughter (2008), focusing on the impact on her throughout her life of her relations with her parents (her mother peevish and cold, her father affectionate and companionate) and of decades of political upheaval in Iran, including the father's incarceration under the Shah on trumped-up charges of financial irregularities. Nafisi has been a visiting fellow and lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and served on the Board of Trustees of Freedom House. Derived from a Kirkus review: An account of growing up under a chilly, tyrannical parent in a changing Iran, by the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. An adversarial relationship with her mother defined the choices she made in her life, writes Nafisi, who now lives in the United States. Raised amid privilege and wealth in Tehran in the 1950s and '60s, the author became aware early on that her parents' marriage, which united two prominent families, was not happy. Both her father and her mother told their children 'fictions,' she declares, official versions of the family history rather than the truth. She took the side of her literary-minded father, who became mayor of Tehran, and had scant sympathy for her dictatorial, paranoid mother, who lamented the untimely death of her first husband and her inability to go to medical school because of her gender. Nafisi grew up enjoying education abroad and freedoms her mother had never known. During the five years in the '60s that her father spent in jail for 'consorting with the opposition,' the then-teenaged author agreed to an ill-starred marriage pushed by her mother, simply to get out of the house. While an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma, Nafisi divorced her first husband and got involved in the nascent Iranian student movement. 'In the seventies it was easy for a young Iranian abroad to be antigovernment,' she writes. 'Inside Iran, of course, it was a different story.' She returned to Tehran shortly after the Revolution in 1979 with her new husband, also an Iranian activist. The young revolutionaries had few illusions about the new Islamic regime, however, and Nafisi and her friends were harassed and imprisoned for their subversive activities. She and her husband finally decided to leave in 1997. She sees her writings as part of the same decision to reject the 'complicity and silent acquiescence,' whether to a tyrannical regime or a domineering parent, that have plagued her life both personally and professionally. An immensely rewarding and beautifully written act of courage, by turns amusing, tender and obsessively dogged.