Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran

Frankly, there are many rich memoirs by Iranian women, all of which have been well worth the read. Lipstick Jihad, however, is unique, since her experience is at odds with most of those of which I have read. She gives us a glimpse into current, post Revolution Iranian society, though as an Iranian who grew up in America. Acceptance, freedom, and nostalgia all play a part in Ms. Moaveni's work. Honest and entertaining, Lipstick Jihad opened a refreshing new window for me to learn about the complex web of contradictions that is today's Iran. Highly recommended!

I dare say that Azadeh Moaveni's book "Lipstick Jihad" will enter into the classics of cultural studies. Unlike its derisive title, the book is probably one of the most insightful of its kind. Moaveni is no doubt a skillful writer, and to have been able to write with such wisdom and clarity at such young age smacks of brilliance. As a diasporic Iranian living in the US for the past thirty years, I resonate to her work in absolute understanding, sentence by sentence, although I belong to her father's generation. Moaveni manages to trespass boundaries and generations. There are so many great statements in the book that it could be called a book of proverbs. My favorites? I found statements on every page that bedazzled me with her wit, satire, bitterness, sarcasm, and perceptiveness. Here are a few: On fatwa against poodles: "Iranians felt a harsh contempt for the clerics, who had taken over an oil-rich country in the name of Islam, sunk its economy, and now spent their days railing against poodles." On the difference between expressing herself in Farsi and English: "I tried to explain, dismayed to see notions like "I need space" evaporate into meaninglessness in Farsi. It was as though the soft, soap-opera lighting of English had been witched off, and replaced by harsh, fluorescent glare of Farsi." About her favorite caf in Tehran: "It was the only caf in Tehran designed with innovative elegance and attracted young people starved for aesthetic beauty - the artists, writers, and musicians whose sensibilities suffered acutely in a city draped with grim billboards of war martyrs." On the prohibition of mingling of genders, and its results for Islamization of the Iranian society: "The Tehran of the revolution was one of the most sexualized milieus I had ever encountered...the constant exposure to covered flesh brought to mind, well, flesh." On the harassment of women by men for their lack of proper Islamic attire: "This is how the regime eased its burden of repression: by conditioning people to police one another. If you had conducted a national referendum that very day, the vast majority of Iranians - men and women alike - would have voted to abolish the mandatory veil. But accustomed to being watched in public, people internalized the minding gaze of the regime, and turned it back outward. " About the Iranian culture: "Here is [a] culture liberal with affection but stingy with tolerance."

This beautifully written memoir will appeal to expats all over the world who, as Moaveni puts it, "perpetually exist in each world feeling the tug of the other." (p. 243) It will especially appeal to the young and hip "hyphenateds" who grew up in America but have always felt lost between two worlds, that of their family's culture and that of their adopted country. The fact that Moaveni is Iranian-American really doesn't matter because her story will be familiar to all who have had to leave their homeland and grow up in a different world. Moaveni was actually born in Palo Alto, California to secular Islamic Iranian immigrants who did indeed leave Iran during the tumultuous days of the Iranian Revolution nearly thirty years ago. Her story is about returning to Tehran during the years leading up to 9/11 and working as a stringer and then as a reporter for Time Magazine and other publications. Hers is a very personal story, as all memoirs are, in which she attempts to capture the estrangement that one feels being, as the subtitle has it, "Iranian in America and American in Iran." Thanks to Moaveni's obvious love of language and some very nice editing by Kate Darton at Public Affairs, she has written a most engaging and strikingly vivid account. To be honest I could not, as the reviewer's cliche has it, "put it down." I read it in one gulp absolutely delighted with Moaveni's vivid, candid and honest narrative. She is hip, sophisticated beyond her years, stylish, and very well informed. Her prose approaches poetry and because she is always concrete, it is never boring or estranged from the needs of the reader, as memoirs can sometimes be. We learn how it feels to be in love in a country where couples may not hold hands in public; how it feels to party in a land where parties are forbidden except as decreed by the state; how it feels to eat a pomegranate in the bathtub after being harassed by secret agents of the ayatollahs; how it feels to be beaten by street thugs (the ignorant Basiji, the brown shirts of the mullahs); how it feels to wear the veil and the chador and to hide one's hair and femininity and to be hit on by hypocritical clerics offering "temporary marriages"; how it feels to live with "the central dilemma of life under the Islamic regime, and its culture of lies--whether to observe the taboos and the restrictions, or resist them, by living as if they didn't exist." (p. 74) Moaveni lets us in on the daily lives of her family and friends as they try to make sense of their place in the world. We taste the foods that they eat, the highly spiced lamb stews, the sour cherry jams, the lavash-wrapped dates, servings of "four-days-in-the-making" sweet halvah. We hear their voices and learn what they think of America, of the mullahs, of the secular society, of how one acts in public and in private. I was surprised at how Westernized Tehran really is despite the best efforts of the morality police, and yet how tenaciously Iranian are

This book portrays a country wrought with social ills after 25 years of being destroyed by a corrupt, morally bankrupt regime. It explores the many layers of Iranian society in ian itself and also in the rest of the world. The Iranian diaspora is one of the most complicated of any, and Azadeh Moaveni deals with subject matter very well, describing well the struggle she (and many others, myself included) finds when discussing it. Well done.

This book relays the complex reality of a woman that holds multiple identities. Ms Moaveni is able to give a portrayal of Iranian youth becuase she is an Iranian woman, and it is understood to an English-reading audience because she is also an American woman. Given her age group and status as an Iranian-American journalist in Tehran she sheds light to a particular group of young Iranians that we would otherwise not know. I welcome and recommend this book at a time when Iran and the region remain misinterpreted and misunderstood.