Prison Memoir

My mother seemed happy, and this astonished me. Shahrnush Parsipur’s unflinching and often surprising memoir spares no honesty and is published here in its entirety in English for the first time. At 25, she divorces her husband and tries to make an independent life for herself and her young son in Paris, writing and studying Chinese at the Sorbonne. But the turmoil of post-revolutionary Tehran soon draws her back. Contemplating different political factions, feeling aligned with none of them, she feels herself, in fact, not particularly political.

Yet she was imprisoned four times, first for managing her leftwing brother’s video store, and soon for publishing Women Without Men, which immediately became an underground sensation. Not only was she a female novelist, the second to be published in Iran, but her book was also imagining a world where women were free to live as they liked.

Following persistent persecution from the Islamist government, Parsipur was eventually driven into exile, in California. Capturing the surreal experience of serving time as a political prisoner without charge, witnessing the systematic elimination of opposition to fundamentalist power, and trying to make sense of it all in the aftermath, Prison Memoir seems written for all those standing at the perimeter of conflict with little sense of how to effect change. With candour, wit, and unexpected humour, Prison Memoir is the powerful non-fiction twin to the celebrated novel.