Things I've Been Silent About: Memories

Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in a family in Iran, moving memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and difficult mother, against the background of Iran during a time of revolution and change. A young girl's pain over family secrets and a mother's lost life, a young woman's discovery of the power of sensuality in literature, the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by political upheaval — these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir, as a gifted storyteller once again uses her own life to transform the way we see the world and "reminds us of why we read in the first place" (Newsday).

Azar Nafisi's intelligent and complex mother, disappointed in her dreams of leading an important and romantic life, created mesmerizing fictions about herself, the past, her rich first husband who died at a young age, and her own family. As she talked to her children, she would disappear into these family stories, narratives of triumph that hid as much as they revealed. Nafisi's father escaped into narratives of another kind — into the classic talks of Persian literature — telling his beloved daughter of the great heroes and heroines in Shahnamah, the Persian Book of Kings, and in other Persian classics. As her father began a series of love affairs, his daughter began to lie to her mother about her father's infidelities, and about other events women were supposed to be silent about. Nafisi's complicity in these childhood dramas ultimately led her to resist remaining silent about political, cultural, social, and personal injustices. Part detective story and part portrait of an exceptional woman, marriage, and mother-father-daughter struggle, Things I've Been Silent About is also a deeply personal reflection on women's choices, and on how Azar Nafisi found inspiration for a different kind of woman's life, first in stories by Persian writers and then in stories by Western writers, such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

eaching back in time to reflect on other generations in the Nafisi family, Things I've Been Silent About is also a powerful historical portrait of a family's life that spans the twentieth century in Iran, during many periods of change leading up to the Islamic Revolution of 1978-1979, which turned Azar Nafisi's beloved Iran into a religious dictatorship. Writing of the strength and intelligence that allowed her mother to serve in Parliament, even while her father, once mayor of Tehran, was in jail, Nafisi also explores the coffee hours her mother held all her life, where at first women came together to gossip, to tell fortunes, and to give silent acknowledgment of things never spoken about, and then evolved to where men and women would meet to openly discuss the unfolding revolution.

This unforgettable portrait of a woman, a family, and of a troubled beloved homeland is a stunning book that millions of readers will embrace, a new triumph from an author who is a modern master of the memoir.

The author of the international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran now offers a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, with moving memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and difficult mother, against the background of Iran during a time of revolution and change.

Azar Nafisi is a visiting professor and the director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University. She has taught Western literature at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and the University of Allameh Tabatabai in Iran. In 1981 she was expelled from the University of Tehran after refusing to wear the veil. In 1994 she won a teaching fellowship from Oxford University, and in 1997 she and her family left Iran for America. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic and has appeared on countless radio and television programs. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.