A young Iranian-American journalist returns to Tehran and discovers not only the oppressive and decadent life of her Iranian counterparts who have grown up since the revolution, but the pain of searching for a homeland that may not exist.

As far back as she can remember, Azadeh Moaveni has felt at odds with her tangled identity as an Iranian-American. In suburban America, Azadeh lived in two worlds. At home, she was the daughter of the Iranian exile community, serving tea, clinging to tradition, and dreaming of Tehran. Outside, she was a California girl who practiced yoga and listened to Madonna. For years, she ignored the tense standoff between her two cultures. But college magnified the clash between Iran and America, and after graduating, she moved to Iran as a journalist. This is the story of her search for identity, between two cultures cleaved apart by a violent history. It is also the story of Iran, a restive land lost in the twilight of its revolution.

Moaveni's homecoming falls in the heady days of the country's reform movement, when young people demonstrated in the streets and shouted for the Islamic regime to end. In these tumultuous times, she struggles to build a life in a dark country, wholly unlike the luminous, saffron and turquoise-tinted Iran of her imagination. As she leads us through the drug-soaked, underground parties of Tehran, into the hedonistic lives of young people desperate for change, Moaveni paints a rare portrait of Iran's rebellious next generation. The landscape of her Tehran — ski slopes, fashion shows, malls and cafes — is populated by a cast of young people whose exuberance and despair brings the modern reality of Iran to vivid life.
 

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Azadeh Moaveni grew up in San Jose and studied politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She won a Fulbright fellowship to Egypt, and studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo. For three years she worked across the Middle East as a reporter for Time Magazine, before joining the Los Angeles Times to cover the war in Iraq. She lives in Beirut.
 

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A note from Azadeh Moaveni
 

I was born in Palo Alto, California, into the lap of an Iranian diaspora community awash in nostalgia and longing for an Iran many thousands of miles away. Five years ago, I moved to Tehran as a reporter, and watched my exile fantasies dissolve. I found an Iran that was culturally confused, politically deadlocked, and emotionally anguished, a society engaged in a visceral struggle over the fate of the Islamic Revolution. As an Iranian living this turbulent time, I felt permanently frustrated that my articles for the American media could not capture how Iranians were experiencing the transformations in their society. The rich panorama of Iranian life, its edgy underground, and stormy, shifting moods, spilled outside the frame of news.

I wanted to explore the psychologies of young people —demographically, the country's future — and illustrate the kitsch, hedonism, and despair that underpinned their rebellion against the Islamic system. In the Iran that I knew, young people were not victims. I wanted to write something that reflected that, in a voice anchored in an emotional present tense. The young generation taught me that in order to unlock the mystery of Iran — how nothing perceptibly alters, but everything changes — you must live an approximation of a young Iranian's life. That is why I cannot write about them without writing about myself. That is why this is both their story, and my own.   Top