An autumn sonata

As the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran was working on her new memoir, Things I've Been Silent About, she found herself wondering whether she had written them in the wrong order.

“Maybe I should have written this one first and Reading Lolita second,'' Azar Nafisi recalls thinking. “Because so many keys to that one are in this one.''

On its face, this does not seem like a good idea. Yet it is true that Nafisi's second memoir illuminates her first.

Reading Lolita told the story of the subversive two-year class that Nafisi conducted for a group of Iranian women, beginning in 1995, after she resigned a university position made untenable by Iran's theocratic regime.

For two years, before she emigrated to the United States, Nafisi and her students created a sphere of private freedom, peopling it with the fictions of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen and Henry James.

So how did she come up with her unusual survival strategy, combating the tyranny of the Islamic Republic through the secret sharing of stories she loved?

One key, as Things I've Been Silent About makes clear, is that she had been using shared stories to fight tyranny — of a more private kind — since she was 4 years old.

Nafisi's mother, Nezhat, was a deeply unhappy woman from a well-connected Iranian family.

Her own mother died when she was very young and she was treated by her stepmother as a poor relation. Most crushingly, Nezhat's adored first husband turned out to have a fatal disease.

Nafisi's father, Ahmad, was drawn to the young widow because she was beautiful, intelligent and sad.

But he was also “an ambitious young man'' who believed that the connections she brought could help him rise.

The price was steep. His wife would spend their marriage irrationally blaming those around her for her losses.

By the time Nafisi was 4, she and her mother were locked in conflict. Anything could be a battleground but an especially bitter one involved the arrangement of furniture in Nafisi's bedroom.

She wanted her bed by the window. Her mother refused. Her father came up with a plan to console her.

“Why don't we make up a story about a little girl and her bed?'' he suggested. From then on, “my father and I developed a secret language.

We made up stories to communicate our feelings.''

Their shared world expanded to embrace stories from the Shahnameh — the mythic “Book of Kings'', by the 11th-century poet Ferdowsi, that is Iran's national epic.

The universe of literature and imagination became the sole part of Nafisi's life into which her mother could not intrude.

Strands of life

Stories, she had learnt, could help her deal with “a reality that I can't control''.

Things I've Been Silent About braids together numerous strands of Nafisi's childhood. But a constant strand was the mother-daughter war.

Two other strands from Nafisi's childhood stand out because they brought that childhood to a crashing end:

Her father went to jail.

And she married a man she did not love.

At 16, when her father was imprisoned and her mother was impossible as ever, she impulsively accepted a marriage proposal.

She regrets that so much that she sees a painful childhood molestation by a distant relative as trivial by comparison.

“My marriage, I felt ‘really' dirty. And it wasn't because of him. It was because I made a choice that went against my own principles,'' Nafisi says.

She ended the marriage early, with no children.

She had followed her husband to the United States, enrolling in the University of Oklahoma while he finished a degree there, and after the divorce she continued her studies.

Eventually, through anti-shah activism in the US, she met an Iranian student leader named Bijan Naderi.

They married and, shortly after the shah's fall, returned home. Like so many who had opposed Pahlavi's brutal regime, they had not foreseen the theocratic extremism that would replace it.

Eighteen difficult years later, they and their two children left Iran for good. Nafisi carried with her the germ of what would become Reading Lolita in Tehran.

She would structure the book around four authors whose work sheds light on tyranny in its many forms.

Nabokov's Lolita features a narrator whose obsession blinds him to the humanity of his victim.

Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby warns of the consequences when dreams, personal or political, are kept alive by denying reality.

James's work centres on ambiguity, which totalitarians cannot tolerate.

Then there is Austen's Pride and Prejudice, often seen as a book about getting married and living happily. “Austen is ‘never' about that,'' Nafisi says heatedly.

“People who say it's about agreeing to marriage are insane!'' No. It is about a woman who resists social pressure — much of it from a tyrannical mother — and insists on making her own choice.