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.

"Nafisi follows up the internationally acclaimed Reading Lolita in Tehran with another memoir, concentrating this time on her unhappy family life. Her mother was vocally nostalgic for her first marriage to a man who died two years after their wedding day, while her father sought the company of other women — not so much for sexual excitement as for emotional stability. Nafisi's parents' relationship was so off-kilter that when her father, the mayor of Tehran, was accused of plotting against the shah and thrown into jail, one of his main hopes was that it would finally reconcile them. Nafisi grew up determined to 'become the woman [my mother] claimed she had wanted to be,' but an adolescent education in England and an impulsive first marriage (followed by college in the U.S.) did not bring the happiness she sought. The calm candor with which she narrates her experiences, from childhood sexual abuse to a frightening confrontation when her second husband argues with a religious zealot over her unscarved hair, provides a solid emotional anchor — and the intimate drama at her memoir's core, the conflicting frustration with a parent and the desire for connection, is one that will resonate with readers everywhere." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Oh Mother, eternally recurring Mother of women's memoirs! In her preface to "Things I've Been Silent About," Azar Nafisi promises us a family chronicle that, like her previous work, "Reading Lolita in Tehran," will reflect on "a turbulent era in Iran's political and cultural history." But we soon find ourselves so obsessively focused on a venerable staple of women's writings — the maelstrom of a tortured... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) mother-daughter relationship — that sociopolitical concerns such as the rise of Mossadegh or the fall of the last Shah fade from consciousness. There is no reason to complain: The author's supermom is as perplexing and fascinating as any we've met in contemporary letters.

That mother, the beautiful, elegant, notoriously outspoken Nehzat Nafisi, was a doyenne of Tehran society who briefly served as a left-wing member of Iran's Parliament. As depicted here by her daughter, she is a hysteric plagued by her perceived lack of fulfillment, often throwing temper tantrums that alienate the relatives and friends whom she most loves. A prodigious mythologizer who turns "glacial" whenever her version of reality is contested, she constantly reshapes her past to aggrandize herself, often boasting, for instance, that she would have become a great doctor if she'd been allowed to attend university. As invasive as she is insolent, she forages shamelessly in her daughter's diaries and personal mail, listening in on her phone conversations and commenting on them with disdain or sardonic rage.

Yet this harsh, aloof perfectionist, who is so arrogantly proud of her excellent French that she won't let her daughter speak it with even a faint accent, is occasionally capable of tenderness and generosity. "When ... I needed her," Nafisi writes, "she turned soft and caring, as if her good genie had suddenly woken from a long sleep." In sum, what the author and the rest of her family find most frustrating about the intractable Nezhat is her total unpredictability. "Each person would pass her on to the next like a dangerous explosive, hoping she would blow up somewhere else."

Nafisi's father, however, provides a safe haven from her mother's turbulence. "If Mother commanded and demanded," she writes, "my father lured and seduced." A genial, even-tempered, highly regarded civil servant who spent some years as mayor of Tehran, Ahmad Nafisi is also a man of formidable culture. During a jail term contrived on trumped-up charges by jealous rivals, he reads French novels and Buddhist texts, paints still lifes, polishes his German, translates poems by Paul Eluard and Victor Hugo. His friends and admirers are so numerous that when he is set free in 1966 on a bail of $6.5 million, the money is raised in a matter of days. A gifted storyteller, he fires his beloved daughter's literary imagination by initiating her into both Persian and Western literature, helping her to build what she calls her "portable home" — her literary career.

But the true drama at the heart of Nafisi's memoir is that, try as she might to "protect them from each other," these two extraordinary people — her parents — remain savagely estranged. With typical impudence, Mother insists that her marriage to Azar's father had been "a mistake, a poor second" to her life with her first husband, a high-society invalid (his father was Iran's prime minister), who died within a year of their unconsummated marriage. Father responds to his wife's insolence by describing her as "one of those who think they are God's chosen people and (never make) mistakes"; by engaging in a few dalliances; and, ultimately, by divorcing her.

How does young Azar deal with this maelstrom of a family? First, by escaping into scholarship: A gifted student, she attends boarding school in England and Switzerland, and university in the United States. Having finished her Ph.D. thesis on Vladimir Nabokov at John Hopkins, she returns to Tehran in 1980, the year after the Islamic Revolution that dethroned the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, and installed Ayatollah Khomeini. She first teaches at the University of Tehran, from which she is expelled for refusing to wear the obligatory veil, and eventually at the University of Tabatabai, where the novelists she reads with her students — Eliot, Austen, Twain, Flaubert — offer her beloved refuge: that "democracy of voices" so direly lacking in the Islamic Republic.

Azar's other haven from the tempest of Mother's home — marriage — is far riskier. Sex with her unloved first husband, a well-born, insensitive engineer whom she will soon divorce, makes her feel wretchedly "dirty and guilty," leading her to a sense of shame "that would not wear off for a very long time." The author's second and seemingly happy marriage to her current husband is enthusiastically welcomed by her parents, and one senses that this accomplished, fiercely independent scholar and feminist remains touchingly dependent on parental approval. She is radiantly proud when Mother boasts to her friends of her daughter's rebellious achievements or urges Azar to "tell them, tell them what 'they' (the imams) are doing at the universities to women" each time she gives a lecture or speaks on the BBC.

Nafisi's abiding sorrow is that she was not able to be present at her parents' deaths. Her father died in 2004, the day after his doctor permitted him to travel to London to see Azar and her brother. Her mother had died a year earlier, steeped in illusions, as she had lived: Her friends allayed the misery of her terminal illness by assuring her that the Islamic Republic regime had been toppled, and that President Rafsanjani was "awaiting trial." Nafisi is now free — how poignant this liberation is for all memoirists — to write about the things she'd "been silent about."

Nafisi's sensory descriptions of Tehran life — the "enticing cacophony" of its streets, the daily forays her mother makes to the market, where she appears to be "so much at home in this world of chocolates, leather, and spices" — are as vivid as the portraits of her exotically dysfunctional family. My one grievance concerning "Things I've Been Silent About" is that, like many a Near Eastern family reunion, the book is excessively crowded. Chatty cousin after chatty cousin, friend after friend, ponderous wise man after ponderous wise man barge into Nafisi's pages, too briefly described to warrant our interest, crowding and often muddling her narrative. But this is a modest complaint to make about an utterly memorable (pardon the alliteration) memoir.

Francine du Plessix Gray is the author, most recently, of "Them: A Memoir of Parents" and "Madame de Stael: the First Modern Woman."

Reviewed by Francine du Plessix Gray, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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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.