Things I've Been Silent About: Memories is the second memoir of Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, which became an international bestseller in 2003.
This new book is a collection of Nafisi's memories of growing up in Tehran as a privileged girl in an elite family with a complicated, overwhelming mother, who didn't give her children any personal space, and a charming but sad father, who filled Nafisi's childhood with stories from the Shahnameh (The Persian Book of Kings) and whose desperate search for a happy family life never seemed to bear fruit.
Nafisi is tangled in the web of her dysfunctional family, trying to see herself as the person she truly is and not as her mother and father want her to be, and, eventually, she escapes her troubled family life and gets into a marriage that ends in divorce.
The backdrop to this story is Iran, which is slowly moving toward the devastating Islamic revolution of 1979 that, even though it succeeded in overthrowing the autocratic Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, eventually, instead of delivering its promises of democracy, resulted in the loss of even the basic personal freedoms of Iranian citizens.
Nafisi's mother, whose first husband – the son of a prime minister – died a couple of years after their marriage, never seems to be able to move on and love her second husband, Nafisi's father, and lives in a fictional world she has created, one that she regularly reinvents depending on circumstances. By doing so, she destroys her relationship with all of the members of her family and drives them further and further away from her.
Nafisi is sent abroad when she is about 12 or 13 and spends years in England, Switzerland and the United States, visiting her family in Iran in between her studies, and returning to that country shortly after the Islamic revolution.
In about 1961, Nafisi's father becomes mayor of Tehran, and later her mother is elected as one of the first female members of the Iranian parliament. But her father is arrested in 1963 – when he is still the mayor – and remains in prison, without trial, for four years on charges of alleged corruption.
However, the truth is that he is the victim of a conspiracy by his political rivals, who have accused him of sympathizing with Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters.
Nafisi tells her family story with a sure, steady hand; for me (I was born and raised in Iran), Things I've Been Silent About is a vivid collection of familiar images and emotions, but for the Western reader it will be an interesting journey through Iran's history, from the mid-1900s to a few years after the Islamic revolution of 1979, intertwined with family tension and drama.
When reading a memoir that is set against a serious and important historical background, I usually create a “timeline,” marking the date and place of every notable event in the book. This helps me remember things and put them into perspective.
However, I found creating the “timeline” of Things I've Been Silent About quite challenging, if not impossible. Even though this book is about Nafisi's life, I couldn't find her date of birth in it, not even on the copyright page. It is important to know the age of the heroine of a memoir: How old is she when she moves away from home to a distant and strange country, falls in love for the first time, or marries?
At the end, I had to Google Nafisi and found that only Wikipedia had her date of birth, which it stated as 1955. However, after spending a long time studying the book's photos and events, I realized that this was basically impossible: Nafisi must have been born in 1948 or '49.
