Jan 30th, 2009. 7:30 p.m. 
Bestselling author Azar Nafisi will be reading and discussing her new memoir, Things I’ve Been Silent About at the University of Miami's Gusman Concert Hall on January 30th, 2009 at 7:30 p.m. This event is presented in collaboration with the University of Miami, Florida Center for the Literary Arts and the Women’s Chamber of Commerce.
Azar Nafisi is the daughter of Ahmad Nafisi, a former mayor of Tehran, and Nezhat Nafisi, who was one of the first women to be elected to the Iranian parliament under the Shah. She left Iran in 1997 and in 2003, she wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which has sold more than 1.5 million copies. Her new memoir, Things I’ve Been Silent About is a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, including memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country’s political revolution.
A girl’s pain over family secrets; a young woman’s discovery of the power of sensuality in literature; the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by political upheaval–these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir, as a gifted storyteller once again transforms the way we see the world and “reminds us of why we read in the first place” (Newsday).
Nafisi’s intelligent and complicated mother, disappointed in her dreams of leading an important and romantic life, created mesmerizing fictions about herself, her family, and her past. But her daughter soon learned that these narratives of triumph hid as much as they revealed. Nafisi’s father escaped into narratives of another kind, enchanting his children with the classic tales like the Shahnamah, the Persian Book of Kings. When her father started seeing other women, young Azar began to keep his secrets from her mother. Nafisi’s complicity in these childhood dramas ultimately led her to resist remaining silent about other personal, as well as political, cultural, and social, injustices.
Reaching back in time to reflect on other generations in the Nafisi family, Things I’ve Been Silent About is also a powerful historical portrait of a family that spans many periods of change leading up to the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79, which turned Azar Nafisi’s beloved Iran into a religious dictatorship. Writing of her mother’s historic term in Parliament, even while her father, once mayor of Tehran, was in jail, Nafisi explores the remarkable “coffee hours” her mother presided over, where at first women came together to gossip, to tell fortunes, and to give silent acknowledgment of things never spoken about, and which then evolved into gatherings where men and women would meet to openly discuss the unfolding revolution.
Things I’ve Been Silent About is, finally, a deeply personal reflection on women’s choices, and on how Azar Nafisi found the inspiration for a different kind of life. This unforgettable portrait of a woman, a family, and a troubled homeland is a stunning book that readers will embrace, a new triumph from an author who is a modern master of the memoir.
Azar Nafisi is a visiting professor and the director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University. She has taught Western literature at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and the University of Allameh Tabatabai in Iran. In 1981 she was expelled from the University of Tehran after refusing to wear the veil. In 1994 she won a teaching fellowship from Oxford University, and in 1997 she and her family left Iran for America. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic and has appeared on countless radio and television programs. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.
University of Miami
Gusman Concert Hall
1314 Miller Drive
Coral Gables, FL 33146
www.booksandbooks.com
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