To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America

This latest addition to the growing body of memoirs of multicultural childhoods is an entertaining account of an upper-middle-class upbringing in Iran and the United States. Skillfully deploying anecdotes of cross-cultural encounters, Bahrampour keeps her narrative moving briskly through her early girlhood in Tehran with her American mother and Iranian father, her adolescence on the American West Coast and her return to Iran after college. Bahrampour shows a light touch is everywhere evident as she details teen culture in 1980s California and her experiences in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. Upon her return to Iran, she notes the banned TV satellite dish of her neighbors, which they hide from roving helicopters by a line of laundry. Deadpan, she wonders ""if the authorities will ever realize that that shirt, that tablecloth, and that towel must be dry by now."" However, Bahrampour overestimates the interest readers will have in her family life: only the exotic appeal of Iran to Americans distinguishes a narrative many people in their 20s could have written about alienation and how their dating habits distressed their families. Bahrampour's ultimate lesson--that ""it is always the place you cannot go to that is the good one""--is as germane to people who have always lived in one shiny American suburb as it is to those who have shuttled between two very different cultures. (Jan.)