Once Again, Families

I have been chipping away at this book Things I've Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi - I think I've been reading it for two months! It's a memoir charting her relationships with her mother and father and as much as I was drawn in by its subject - Dad's death last year has left me thinking about parents in our lives - the baldness of it's revelation has left me feeling a little uncomfortable. I'm not sure about the ethics of it all, the laying bare of families for the world! I think this is the place of fiction. We can use our emotion truth with a different cast of characters.

There is no denying Azar has lived through interesting times. Her father was Mayor of Tehran in the Shah's time and there's lots of black and white photos of him in nightclubs pre-Cultural revolution with elegantly coiffed women. From these worldly groovy times, Azar lives through the rise of fundamentalism and the stripping of women's rights. Like many of her class she studies overseas, in her case England and America and eventually leaves Iran.

It's a beautifully written book and the stories contained within it are compelling.