Azar Nafisi is the daughter of Ahmad Nafisi, a former mayor of Tehran, and Nezhat Nafisi, who was one of the first women to be elected to the Iranian parliament under the Shah. She left Iran in 1997 and in 2003, she wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, (Random House) which has sold more than 1.5 million copies. Her new memoir is Things I’ve Been Silent About (Random House, $27; 978-1-4000-6361-1).

PW: You say at the beginning of this memoir that a strong part of Iranian culture is to never reveal private matters or air dirty laundry.

Azar Nafisi: Yes, usually in Iran, a memoir has a political connotation, about important things people have done. Only recently have people started paying attention to the personal. The Islamic revolution started people looking toward the past to diaries and letters written hundreds of years ago. Before the revolution I hadn’t thought about diaries, memoirs and biographies. Reading Lolita in Tehran was quite painful to write, but this was more painful. I had quite a struggle writing about myself and my family.


PW: How did the book change as you researched you family and memoirs in general?

A.N.: I thought I would be writing about three women: my grandmother, my mother and me. In the beginning, I read and researched a great deal of historical detail to place them in context historically. I started studying memoirs. I read Nigel Nicholson’s beautifully written Portrait of a Marriage, that included information about his mother, Vita Sackville-West’s affair with another woman. In the gorgeous introduction to her diary, she said no one had the whole truth in their possession, so people get pieces in different stories. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing, it’s how you treat it; you must see the complexities and paradoxes. I was also reading the poetry of amazing Iranian women who didn’t write straight-out autobiographies but wrote about their lives in poetry. I felt it was a little hollow to write about my mother as just a member of parliament. For me, writing this book was a test of myself. It was the most painful experience I’ve ever had. When I got involved in feelings and emotions that were not cultural and historical, I had to be honest with myself and admit those relationships within my family preoccupied me. That was one reason I struggled with it for many years and it changed as I wrote it. I developed feelings and emotions I didn’t have at the start. It was a raw experience for me.


PW: How did your father's diaries help you in writing Things I’ve Been Silent About?

A.N.: Actually one of the things that amazed me was reading the memoir he wanted to be published. His prison diaries are very political but he was absolutely frank in his unpublished memoir in terms of his relationships and sexual urges. I thought, oh my god he wanted this published. When I read his private diary, it was heartbreaking the way I connected to that person who was so open and generous to people who did him wrong. Reading his memoirs helped me open up. It gave me the courage to feel that if he had published those dairies—a man inside Iran and at his age and he was going to be so honest—why can’t I? I couldn’t write a memoir without reading my father’s diaries. First I started with his prison diaries to document things correctly, but what really amazed me was his personal manner of writing his diaries and I became much more immersed. Those stories were much more interesting than his political ideas.


PW: What did you learn about yourself and your relationship with your parents while writing the memoir?

A.N.: There’s no way to take the book back. It’s too early and painful for me to talk about it. In many ways I’m glad that in writing it, I’m now closer to my mother than I’ve ever felt because I had to write about all the encounters. You have to get under the skin of characters and put yourself in their place. I realized her utter loneliness was tremendous and it made me grateful that my parents gave my brother and I enough love and encouragement despite everything they were going through. Writing about her made me understand her better. I’m not denying the scars but I understand her better now.


PW: Do you remember what sparked your love of literature?

A.N.: In my book, I talk about my obsession with two books that I credit for beginning my love of literature. The epic poem Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings by Abolqasem Ferdowsi and Vis and Ramin by Fakhraddin Gorgani, a medieval love poem that is far more sensual than Romeo & Juliet and with a happy ending. Dick Davis recently translated both. I find that no matter what people ask me about, I can always find a way to answer their question by bringing up these two books. I think that instead of listening to pundits talk about Iran, people need to read Iranian literature like these two books and experience the raw sensuality and the rebellion against convention and cruelty that is so strong in Iranian poetry.