Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #239372 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-28
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 249 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Time reporter Moaveni, the American-born child of Iranian exiles, spent two years (2000–2001) working in Tehran. Although she reports on the overall tumult and repression felt by Iranians between the 1999 pro-democracy student demonstrations and the 2002 "Axis of Evil" declaration, the book's dominant story is more intimate. Moaveni was on a personal search "to figure out my relationship" to Iran. Neither her adolescent ethnic identity conundrums nor her idyllic memories of a childhood visit prepared her for the realities she confronted as she navigated Iran, learning its rules, restrictions and taboos—and how to evade and even exploit them like a local. Because she was a journalist, the shadowy, unnerving presence of an Iranian intelligence agent/interrogator hovered continually ("it would be useful if we saw your work before publication," he told her). Readers also get intimate glimpses of domestic life: Moaveni lived among family and depicts clandestine partying, women's gyms and the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Eventually, Moaveni became "more at home than [her mother] was" in Iran, and a visit to the U.S. showed how Moaveni, who now lives in Beirut, had grown unaccustomed to American life, "where my Iranian instincts served no purpose." Lipstick Jihad is a catchy title, but its flippancy does a disservice to Moaveni's nuanced narrative. Agent, Diana Finch. (Mar.)Forecast:This work, as well as Afschineh Latifi's Even After All This Time, reviewed above, joins the recent explosion of memoirs by women about living in Iran, and could be displayed alongside Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Roya Hakakian's Journey from the Land of No and Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–Moaveni went to Tehran to report for Time–to find out both the truth about Iran and, she hoped, her "authentic self." One of the strongest memoirs written about being trapped between two countries, the book begins with the author as a young Californian who told friends she was "Persian." Secretly enthralled by the country her parents left during the Islamic Revolution, she wanted to love Iran and determined to give it a chance. She quickly adapted to not smoking or smiling in public. She learned how dating boys and girls seen together on the street are subject to being beaten by the police. During her time in Iran, certain regulations relaxed: veils and roopooshes became available in an array of colors. Citizens pulled off the occasional wild party in the street. There were things she could not accept–as when a friend of hers was caught with a bottle of wine and fined 30 lashes. The author writes well about the aftermath of 9/11–feeling "suspect" in the U.S. and tensing under the weight of President Bush's naming Iran as part of an "Axis of Evil." She includes many stories about Iranians with varying situations and perspectives. Her book is an excellent introduction to the country's recent history and the Islamic Revolution. It makes fine reading both for those who will identify with the author and for those who are curious about how teens in very different countries negotiate their lives.–Emily Lloyd, Stephen J. Betze Library, Georgetown, DE
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Like characters in a play whose first act takes place in the lush summer and whose second act is set against barren winter trees, Iranians have spent the last quarter-century defining themselves against the contrasting backdrops of pre- and post-1979 Iran. Those who stayed in Iran after the Islamic revolution are faced with its consequences every day; those who fled the country are only somewhat more removed. Haunted by loss (of loved ones, of fortunes, of social networks) and sometimes by guilt (for supporting the shah or the revolution too blindly, or for staying too much out of the fray), many have spent these 26 years licking their wounds and mourning their old lives.

It has fallen largely to the younger generation to analyze this experience for Western readers. With a few exceptions, the recent crop of Iran memoirs has been written by women who were children when the revolution struck. Now in their twenties and thirties, they are fluent in English but still conversant in their parents' language, able to explain the intricate latticework of Persian society in the easy, often self-deprecating style of the American autobiography.

Lipstick Jihad, by Azadeh Moaveni, and Even After All This Time, by Afschineh Latifi, offer two versions of this, one of which works better than the other. For Latifi, an Iranian-born New York attorney, Iran switched from dream to nightmare when her father, a colonel in the shah's army, was executed after the revolution. Goodbye to BMWs, swimming clubs and a happy, secure family; hello to relatives seeking to marry off the preteen Latifi sisters to uneducated villagers while angling for the family's remaining assets. The sisters were sent abroad, but Europe and America proved in some ways as traumatic as what they had fled. Eventually they found professional success and were reunited with their mother and brothers in the United States.

Latifi's story is emblematic of many immigrants' experiences -- the fashion faux pas, the English learned from "The Brady Bunch" -- but her book often reads like a litany of these experiences instead of a distillation of them. She seems to have recorded every scene she can remember from her life, in faithful order, giving each equal weight -- a technique that may work in a legal document but feels diffuse in a memoir. She records the date of each sibling's and parent's birthday, provides a staggering 113 family snapshots, and includes minutiae about short-term jobs and law school parties that seem unrelated to the book's themes. Yet the scene in which her mother reveals to her brothers how their father died, years after the fact, gets only a page and is summed up with "there was a great deal of crying in the house that night."

At age 9, Latifi was told that the revolution was engineered by the "intensely fanatical . . . fundamentalist mujahedeen"; as she grew older, she didn't examine it much beyond that. If she ever reflected, during her lonely teenage exile, on why the uprising was so popular, if she ever felt ambivalence about her family's former privileged position or anger at her father's tragic refusal to flee, these feelings are trumped by loyalty to her parents, whose absence of flaws in her eyes makes them lack dimension as characters. Latifi's view of Iran is black and white, and a quick trip back there at the end of the book doesn't add nuance; after she and her mother have trouble at a hotel because they are unaccompanied women, she laments that "these people have ruined Iran" and hurries back to New York.

Azadeh Moaveni was born in 1976 into an Iranian expatriate community in northern California that similarly viewed Iran as "a place of light, poetry and nightingales" taken over by "a dark, evil force called the Revolution." As a child she absorbed these "distorting myths of exile," and as a teenager she added her own cultural identity crises to the brew. But having missed the revolution herself, Moaveni grew up less encumbered by the history that weighed on the adults around her, and when she decided to try living and working as a journalist in Tehran, she became a conduit for Iranians and Westerners to gain new perspectives on the country.

She arrived in 2000, when Iran's reformists had started to lose their teeth and their rock-star appeal and the conservatives had eased up on sartorial restrictions while continuing their assault on political freedoms. Moaveni is part of Iran's largest generation, the two-thirds of the country who are under 30 and are more interested in the latest rhinoplasty surgeons and bloggers than in the university's Friday prayer sessions. Some there saw her as a foreigner, and some considered her a wash-up for still being unmarried at 24, but on the whole she blended in with other Iranians and joined in their complex relationship with a country that evokes both fierce love and utter despair from its inhabitants. Years of civil rights abuses make Iranians "dream more modestly," but the criminalization of sexuality makes them crackle with sexual energy. Teenagers in 5-inch heels use martyrs' holidays as an excuse to throw make-out parties; disillusioned matrons trade Islam for yoga; mullahs who rail against "bourgeois" miniature poodles try to get Moaveni's cell phone number for a date.

Lipstick Jihad's sensational-sounding title is in fact apt. It refers to Iranians who, despite the regime's dictates, insist on what Moaveni calls an "as if" lifestyle, living as if it were permitted to "speak your mind, challenge authority . . . wear too much lipstick." Women especially engage every day in this "slow, deliberate, widespread act of defiance. A jihad, in the classical sense of the word: a struggle."

Moaveni has a journalist's eye for that struggle and a memoirist's knack for finding meaning in her own internal conflicts. For her, living in Iran meant inhabiting the "what if" world she might have grown up in, the oft-imagined world made flesh. Much of the time she felt alienated by it, but she writes affectingly of a moment in which her two worlds converged, on a ski slope when a friend used a Farsi term for "dear" that Moaveni recalled from the Iranians in California. "Until then, I had believed smells were the keys that unlocked memory, uniquely able to transport you back to some distant point in the past, in a heady flash. . . . But when I heard the word aziz, that endearment woven into the fabric of my childhood . . . I melted like a cat picked up by the scruff of its neck."

Despite such moments, Moaveni eventually abandoned the struggle to live in Iran. But her journey there provides a welcome alternative to the dark/light vision of it she grew up with. Her book shows us what Iran looks like in spring and fall, with all those seasons' biting winds and unexpected days of sunshine.

Reviewed by Tara Bahrampour
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Best book I've read in a long time
This is simply the best book I have read in a great while. Several issues are addressed: life in the US as a child of immigrants/exiles and how one conceptualizes (and mythologizes) "the old country"; life in Iran as an American-Iranian: someone who feels like they should (are obligated to?) belong but somehow never quite gets all the pieces to fit; and trying to tie these identities together into a whole person.

With few Americans traveling abroad for more than 1-2 week vacations and little opportunity to be more than tourists where ever we go (or to ever be able to understand what it means to move your life to another country, let alone a country where you are considered suspect); this book moves people beyond thinking of Iran as simply "evil", "scary", etc. Life and people there, like anywhere, is complicated and many things to many people. The Western view of Iran has traditionally been to focus on the terrible and extreme or conversely to romanticise it and see only the mythical, the static ancient history.

Whichever side of the coin most Americans tend to focus on, it is usually an uncomplicated, uninformed view of the nation and the people. This book allows the reader a peek into a small section of life there to see ugly, wonderful, beautiful, happy, terrified, hopeful, dispondent people.
She never claims to represent anyone other than herself, she doesn't try to speak for Iran or Iranians or Iranian Americans- she just lets us look at the world through her eyes for a little while.

Azadeh Moaveni also allows us to follow her in her search for a place and identity that seems perpetually just out of reach. Like the tale about the Simorgh, the journey to find this place and identity eventually leads her (and the reader) to look within.

Unfortunately this review can't do the book justice- I highly recommend this book to anyone, period.

Interesting, but not captivating
Azadeh Moaveni's "Lipstick Jihad" is interesting and well-written, but not captivating. Much of the criticism from other reviewers revolves around her well-to-do social status and her focus on the young, upper- and middle-class generation with which she seems to have spent her time. Is this an "authentic" description of contemporary Iran? Were this a work of journalism, this critique might be valid, for the book is fully absorbed in the Islamic Republic-style perversions of the otherwise recognizable drama of being a young adult. And one can hardly charge her with misleading the reader on this account, as I can't think of a more apt description of this book's focus than the subtitle itself: "A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran."

The appropriate question to ask is not what the subject of her book is, but how well she has captured it. It is for this that I only give three stars. She rides from interesting anecdote to interesting anecdote, and when discussing her sense of being suspended between Iranian and American identities she can really shine. But her attempts to draw perspective often left me skeptical. She's fully capable of viewing her environment critically, but I'm not convinced she ever transcended it, looked back and encapsulated it for her audience.

When I finished each chapter I was not compelled to start the next and only rarely found myself lost in its pages. I am glad I read the book, and learned much about the political and social dimensions of life in contemporary Iran. But a memoirist's role is larger - even, in some ways, dishonest. For a memoir must universalize the personal, must order and narrate a life that rarely comes with either. In Moaveni's abstraction of her experience she only puts forward an interesting read, not a great one.

Interesting, but somewhat narrow in outlook
I enjoyed this book and found it somewhat enlightening about Iran and it was interesting to read how the younger set manages to socialize despite the constant repression by their government. Before going to Iran to live for a time, the author has an idyllic remembrance of a visit there, coupled with the reminicenses of her family. Once she gets there she gets an education of what it's like to live in a society that is in no way free and is governed by religious fanatics.

I was annoyed that she still felt so torn throughout the book - she wanted Iran to be so different, and seemed to consider herself Iranian, never once acknowledging her great good fortune of having been born an American. She never mentioned an appreciation for America, only yearning for a better Iran so she could stay there, and ultimately went to live in Beirut but doesn't say why. She could not have a fulfilled life in America?

Another thing that bothered me was the narrow perspective. She wrote about how the people she socialized with didn't care at all about Islam and weren't religious, thus giving the impression that the only religious fanatics in Iran are the people running the government. She seemed to think that if Iran could go back to a secular government that Islam would no longer be a problem for Iranians. Also I would have liked more depth pertaining to the problems women experience in this type of environment.