My Name Is Iran: A Memoir

“Ardalan’s testimony to the feminist spirit of the pioneering women in her family, and in the face of centuries-long strictures against the advancement of women, is a supreme achievement.”—Publishers Weekly

 

Drawing on her remarkable personal history, Davar Ardalan brings us the lives of three generations of women and their ordeals with love, rejection, and revolution. Ardalan’s Iranian American parents, who barely spoke Farsi, moved from San Francisco to rural Iran in 1964. After her parents’ divorce, Ardalan briefly joined her father in Brookline, Massachusetts, then, however improbably, decided to move back to an Islamic Iran. When she arrived, she discovered a world she hardly recognized, and one which demanded a near-complete renunciation of the freedoms she experienced in the West. In time, she and her young family make the opposite migration and discover the difficulties, however paradoxical, inherent in living a free life in America.