Things I've Been Silent About: Memories [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: rotten genes, coffee sessions, Amoo Said, Azar Nafisi, Ameh Hamdam (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nafisi follows up the internationally acclaimed Reading Lolita in Tehran with another memoir, concentrating this time on her unhappy family life. Her mother was vocally nostalgic for her first marriage to a man who died two years after their wedding day, while her father sought the company of other women—not so much for sexual excitement as for emotional stability. Nafisi's parents' relationship was so off-kilter that when her father, the mayor of Tehran, was accused of plotting against the shah and thrown into jail, one of his main hopes was that it would finally reconcile them. Nafisi grew up determined to become the woman [my mother] claimed she had wanted to be, but an adolescent education in England and an impulsive first marriage (followed by college in the U.S.) did not bring the happiness she sought. The calm candor with which she narrates her experiences, from childhood sexual abuse to a frightening confrontation when her second husband argues with a religious zealot over her unscarved hair, provides a solid emotional anchor—and the intimate drama at her memoir's core, the conflicting frustration with a parent and the desire for connection, is one that will resonate with readers everywhere. (Jan. 6)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Francine du Plessix Gray Oh Mother, eternally recurring Mother of women's memoirs! In her preface to Things I've Been Silent About, Azar Nafisi promises us a family chronicle that, like her previous work, Reading Lolita in Tehran, will reflect on "a turbulent era in Iran's political and cultural history." But we soon find ourselves so obsessively focused on a venerable staple of women's writings -- the maelstrom of a tortured mother-daughter relationship -- that socio-political concerns such as the rise of Mossadegh or the fall of the last Shah fade from consciousness. There is no reason to complain: The author's super-mom is as perplexing and fascinating as any we've met in contemporary letters. That mother, the beautiful, elegant, notoriously outspoken Nezhat Nafisi, was a doyenne of Tehran society who briefly served as a left-wing member of Iran's Parliament. As depicted here by her daughter, she is a hysteric plagued by her perceived lack of fulfillment, often throwing temper tantrums that alienate the relatives and friends whom she most loves. A prodigious mythologizer who turns "glacial" whenever her version of reality is contested, she constantly reshapes her past to aggrandize herself, often boasting, for instance, that she would have become a great doctor if she'd been allowed to attend university. As invasive as she is insolent, she forages shamelessly in her daughter's diaries and personal mail, listening in on her phone conversations and commenting on them with disdain or sardonic rage. Yet this harsh, aloof perfectionist, who is so arrogantly proud of her excellent French that she won't let her daughter speak it with even a faint accent, is occasionally capable of tenderness and generosity. "When . . . I needed her," Nafisi writes, "she turned soft and caring, as if her good genie had suddenly woken from a long sleep." In sum, what the author and the rest of her family find most frustrating about the intractable Nezhat is her total unpredictability. "Each person would pass her on to the next like a dangerous explosive, hoping she would blow up somewhere else." Nafisi's father, however, provides a safe haven from her mother's turbulence. "If Mother commanded and demanded," she writes, "my father lured and seduced." A genial, even-tempered, highly regarded civil servant who spent some years as mayor of Tehran, Ahmad Nafisi is also a man of formidable culture. During a jail term contrived on trumped-up charges by jealous rivals, he reads French novels and Buddhist texts, paints still lifes, polishes his German, translates poems by Paul Éluard and Victor Hugo. His friends and admirers are so numerous that when he is set free in 1966 on a bail of $6.5 million, the money is raised in a matter of days. A gifted storyteller, he fires his beloved daughter's literary imagination by initiating her into both Persian and Western literature, helping her to build what she calls her "portable home" -- her literary career. But the true drama at the heart of Nafisi's memoir is that, try as she might to "protect them from each other," these two extraordinary people -- her parents -- remain savagely estranged. With typical impudence, Mother insists that her marriage to Azar's father had been "a mistake, a poor second" to her life with her first husband, a high-society invalid (his father was Iran's prime minister), who died within a year of their unconsummated marriage. Father responds to his wife's insolence by describing her as "one of those who think they are God's chosen people and [never make] mistakes"; by engaging in a few dalliances; and, ultimately, by divorcing her. How does young Azar deal with this maelstrom of a family? First, by escaping into scholarship: A gifted student, she attends boarding school in England and Switzerland, and university in the United States. Having finished her PhD thesis on Vladimir Nabokov at John Hopkins, she returns to Tehran in 1980, the year after the Islamic Revolution that dethroned the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, and installed Ayatollah Khomeini. She first teaches at the University of Tehran, from which she is expelled for refusing to wear the obligatory veil, and eventually at the University of Tabatabai, where the novelists she reads with her students -- Eliot, Austen, Twain, Flaubert -- offer her beloved refuge: that "democracy of voices" so direly lacking in the Islamic Republic. Azar's other haven from the tempest of Mother's home -- marriage -- is far riskier. Sex with her unloved first husband, a well-born, insensitive engineer whom she will soon divorce, makes her feel wretchedly "dirty and guilty," leading her to a sense of shame "that would not wear off for a very long time." The author's second and seemingly happy marriage to her current husband is enthusiastically welcomed by her parents, and one senses that this accomplished, fiercely independent scholar and feminist remains touchingly dependent on parental approval. She is radiantly proud when Mother boasts to her friends of her daughter's rebellious achievements or urges Azar to "tell them, tell them what 'they' [the imams] are doing at the universities to women" each time she gives a lecture or speaks on the BBC. Nafisi's abiding sorrow is that she was not able to be present at her parents' deaths. Her father died in 2004, the day after his doctor permitted him to travel to London to see Azar and her brother. Her mother had died a year earlier, steeped in illusions, as she had lived: Her friends allayed the misery of her terminal illness by assuring her that the Islamic Republic regime had been toppled, and that President Rafsanjani was "awaiting trial." Nafisi is now free -- how poignant this liberation is for all memoirists -- to write about the things she'd "been silent about." Nafisi's sensory descriptions of Tehran life -- the "enticing cacophony" of its streets, the daily forays her mother makes to the market, where she appears to be "so much at home in this world of chocolates, leather, and spices" -- are as vivid as the portraits of her exotically dysfunctional family. My one grievance concerning Things I've Been Silent About is that, like many a Near Eastern family reunion, the book is excessively crowded. Chatty cousin after chatty cousin, friend after friend, ponderous wise man after ponderous wise man barge into Nafisi's pages, too briefly described to warrant our interest, crowding and often muddling her narrative. But this is a modest complaint to make about an utterly memorable (pardon the alliteration) memoir.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (December 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400063612
• ISBN-13: 978-1400063611
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #29,201 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Personal Story, January 2, 2009

By	ArouraLeona "AL" (Washington USA) - See all my reviews

Though I very much enjoyed "Reading Lolita In Tehran," Nafisi's new book, "Things I've Been Silent About" surpasses her first on nearly every level. She still tells the story of her live in conjunction with the books and stories that matter most to her, but "Things I've Been Silent About" is a far more personal tale. You feel that she is letting you into a life she was hesitant to speak of before, and the revelations that take place in the telling are heartbreaking and endearing.

Her struggle with her parents, her place between the two of them, is masterfully told. The hesitation she feels being there, as well as the favoritism she shows her father in many cases, closes any gaps one might have in relating to her story. Most children favor one family member over another at some point, and usually there is some sort of guilt that goes with that favoritism.

I'm rambling a bit, but I can't help it. This book moved me in ways her first book did not. In the end I hardly know what to say, except that you should read it.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nafisi has broken her silence -- and readers should rejoice, January 11, 2009

By	S. McGee (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Azar Nafisi, who will be best-known for the runaway success of her last book, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books has produced that marvel, a flawless, crisply-written and meaningful memoir that more than accomplishes her stated goal, that of telling the recounting "those fragile intersections -- the places where moments in an individual's private life and personality resonate with and reflect a larger, more universal story."

Nafisi is born into the Teheran of the 1940s and 50s, a world in which women such as her mother can receive an education and run for Parliament -- even as her father, a former mayor of Teheran, is imprisoned for unknown reasons and confined for years to a cell. But Nafisi, educated in Europe and the United States, where she joins the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s and becomes a vociferous opponent of the Shah's regime, returns to Iran after the revolution only to discovery the existence of a new kind of "black" totalitarianism -- clerical rule by Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors. It is against the backdrop of the dramatic events of these times -- coups, revolutions, civil war and war -- that Nafisi tells deeply personal stories of her life and those of her parents, two deeply incompatible people who damaged each other and, in their different ways, damaged their daughter.

From an early age, Nafisi learns to take refuge in stories and literature; first, the tales that her father tells her from Persian history and mythology (her favorite character is Ferdowsi's Radabeh, from the Shahnameh chronicles) and later books that range from Annemarie Selinko's historical romance, Desiree, to Tolstoy, George Eliot and -- of course -- Nabokov. Perhaps, she muses, her family relied too much on stories and writing. "Other families talked, we wrote: what we felt or hoped for, our complaints -- we wrote all this, as if we could not bear to look into one another's eyes and just talk."

Nafisi saw her home life with a mother with whom she argued bitterly and continually as a kind of prison; an early, unhappy first marriage, she records, was her bid for escape. Meanwhile, her father sought a different kind of escape in long-term romantic affairs with mistresses who for periods of time became part of the family circle. The turmoil that swirled around the family relationships was drama enough for most memoirs; in this case, it is accompanied by the backdrop of the turbulence of Iran itself, as Nafisi recalls seeing former friends and enemies (and relatives) end up executed by the Khomeini regime. She recounts her struggles to find purpose for herself without betraying her principles. Unusually for memoirs today, she is ruthlessly honest with her younger self and herself today, acknowledging her own frailties (as a result of childhood abuse by a Hajii Agha, a visiting cleric, she writes that she found it easier to confront the militia on the streets of Teheran than to sleep alone at night. Making the abuse itself more intolerable, she says now, was the fact that this behavior -- not uncommon -- "was that it was not talked about and acknowledged publicly. Airing the dirty laundry, this was called."

Nafisi is conscious that she is airing what her parents would have believed was their own dirty laundry, writing about their weaknesses as well as their heroic moments (such as her mother's support of her at critical junctures, including the night she feared she would miscarry her second child because of the Iraqi bombing of Teheran). Moreover, she notes, in Iranian society, "private lives are trivial and not worth writing about." Even her father's published memoir is a "cardboard version of himself" and his real life.

Readers can't help but be grateful to Nafisi for breaking her own silence, whether that was about reading Lolita in Teheran, watching the Marx Brothers in Teheran, or the ways in which her life took shape under the influence of the members of her extended family. The process of writing this memoir may not have produced the elusive 'closure' for Nafisi herself, but it did, she says, produce understanding: "a sense that this narrative might be the the only way through which we can acknowledge our parents and in some form bring them back to life, now that we are free, at last, to shape the boundaries of our own story."

That is a goal that transcends any cultural barriers. Similarly, while Nafisi's eloquent and thoughtful book is unquestionably a product of the author's specific background and experiences, it should appeal to any reader interested in this universal theme.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Before "Reading Lolita In Tehran", January 3, 2009

By	C. Hutton "book maven" (East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Azar Nafisi is writing an earlier memoir about her dysfunctional family, especially her parents. Like Doris Lessing's "Alfred and Emily" and Julia Blackburn's "The Three of Us", this story is one of surviving one's parents. The author came from a mid-level political family and their is the backstory of Iranian history in the last century. The writing is crisp and riveting -- the abuse on numerous levels and her perception of her mother as an emotional controlling monster. After reading this book, the reader should turn to her tale about her later life : "Reading Lolita in Tehran".