Azar Nafisi’s new memoir was inspired by a list of “things she has been silent about” that she kept in her diary. Much like The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, a collection of unusual lists written by an 11th century Japanese court lady, the list format at once frees the women to speak of clandestine events and constricts these memories to simple phrases: “Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran.” Her new book Things I’ve Been Silent About is Nafisi’s attempt to release these memories from what constricts them and to allow them a chance to breathe. Nafisi succeeds in depicting the struggle, pain, beauty, and triumph of the relationships and stories of her family against the backdrop of evolving modern Iran. The turbulence of the present Iran, along with the deaths of her parents, has led her to explore and try to recreate the past in this memoir.

This narrative is more personal than her first, Reading Lolita in Tehran, but Nafisi still retains her masterly ability to link the uniquely personal with the political and even universal qualities of life. Whereas her first book used works of great literature to expound upon what united Nafisi with her students and all lovers of literature, her second book remains focused on Nafisi’s own past, the story of the Nafisi family from as far back as the 17th century.

Political struggles in Iran such as the two revolutions of the 20th century play a secondary role to the personal struggles between mother and daughter or husband and wife. Nafisi, while reading her father’s own de-personalized memoir, notices “how empty and contrived it seemed without those personal stories.” This is not supposed to be the story of the politics of Iran, but the story of a woman and a family. Some of the personal events are harrowing and horrifying, while others are beautiful and uplifting. Nafisi shows the complexity of real people like her mother and father in a way that creates a truly humanized story of family relationships. The portraiture of her family, especially her parents, provides Nafisi with a way to remember and understand the past and its influence.

The mercurial politics of Iran are discussed not from an outsider’s geopolitical analysis but rather from how these forces affected Nafisi, her family, and her friends. Throughout the memoir, Nafisi insists upon the power of storytelling, memories, and characterization. At times the story feels more like a novel than a memoir. We can walk along the fragrant streets of Tehran and taste the chocolat with the young Nafisi.

However this book is distinctly a memoir in its obsession with memories and their consequences. She explores the interplay between history and storytelling, how history can be continually reinvented by who tells the stories, how lives can be invented, how facts can be changed, how memories can be repressed and forgotten. Can we use our memories to find a new truth about our past? What is the use of a memory? All of these questions make for a story that is not only thought-provoking and beautiful but also relatable, further proving the force and power of her memoir.