The Girl Who Wore Punk Under Her Veil

A little girl, a revolution, and a lot of Iron Maiden

Marji is ten years old when the book opens, living in Tehran, and she wants to be a prophet. Not figuratively. She has actual conversations with God in her bedroom, drawn as a kind, robed old man who floats above her bed like a benevolent ceiling fan. Then the Shah falls, the Islamic Revolution happens, and within a few years her country is unrecognizable: veils mandatory, bars closed, her parents’ friends disappearing into prison or worse.

Here’s the thing, Satrapi doesn’t explain the revolution to you like a Wikipedia entry. She lets you absorb it through a kid’s eyes, which means you get the political prisoners and the executions filtered through the same voice that’s obsessed with Bruce Lee and smuggling Iron Maiden tapes. That tonal whiplash is the whole point. A ten year old doesn’t experience history as a clean timeline. She experiences it as her uncle Anoosh telling her incredible stories about his time in prison in Russia, and then getting executed by the new regime a few months later. That gut punch lands harder because the book let you love him first through jokes and small moments, not through a somber intro paragraph telling you to feel sad.

The book eventually splits, and this matters for how you’ll experience it. The first half is Iran: revolution, war with Iraq, the increasing restrictions on daily life. The second half sends teenage Marji to Vienna, alone, where she deals with heartbreak, homelessness for a stretch, and a serious identity crisis about who she even is outside of Iran. I won’t spoil where that goes, but I’ll say the Vienna section is where the book’s reputation gets a little shakier.

What actually works, and the part I have to be honest about

The art is the first thing people mention and for good reason. Satrapi draws in this stark, almost woodcut-simple style, thick black lines, minimal shading, no half tones to hide behind. It sounds like it should feel crude but it does the opposite. When she draws bodies falling from a bombed building, or her friend’s arm found on the street after an airstrike (a scene that still sits in my stomach wrong when I think about it), the simplicity makes it worse in the best way. There’s nowhere to look except at exactly what happened.

I also love how funny it is. There’s a scene where young Marji buys Michael Jackson and Iron Maiden bootlegs off a street vendor while wearing her mandatory veil, and it captures something true about how teenagers everywhere want the same dumb things, revolution or no revolution. The scene where she pretends her uncle died in an accident instead of admitting he was a communist prisoner, just to seem more tragic and interesting to her classmates, is such a specific, embarrassing, true thing for a kid to do. Satrapi doesn’t let herself off the hook for it either. She’s not always likable in this book and she knows it.

Now the criticism, because I promised myself I wouldn’t just gush. The Vienna section drags. I remember reading it on a plane a few years after my first read, hoping to love it as much as the Iran chapters, and instead getting a little impatient. The boyfriend drama and the boarding school stuff reads like fairly standard teenage misery, and it doesn’t have the same electric specificity as the first half, where every page is teaching you something you didn’t know layered inside a story you actually care about. Some of that is probably the point (exile is boring and demoralizing in ways that revolution isn’t), but knowing that doesn’t make those chapters more fun to read. I’ve gone back and forth on whether that’s a flaw in the book or an accurate flaw in how depression actually feels on the page. I land somewhere in between: intentional, but still the weaker half.

I’ll admit something else. Part of why this book hit me so hard the first time might be because I went in with basically no context on Iran beyond headlines, so almost anything specific and human was going to blow my mind a little. I’ve wondered since whether some of my love for it is really just gratitude for being taught something, rather than the book being a flawless piece of art. I think it holds up under that scrutiny, mostly. But I hold the thought loosely.

The most political thing this book does is refuse to let you see Iran as only one thing.

About Marjane Satrapi

Satrapi grew up in Tehran in a family that was politically outspoken and, by her own account, pretty unusual, communists and a great-grandfather who was an emperor, all in one family tree. She left Iran as a teenager, bounced through Vienna, went back briefly, left again for good, and ended up in France, which is where she wrote Persepolis. She’s since directed the animated film adaptation (nominated for an Oscar, genuinely gorgeous, worth watching after you finish the book, not instead of it) and kept making comics and films that are stubbornly personal and often very funny about things that aren’t funny at all. She comes across, in interviews, exactly like she comes across on the page: blunt, self-deprecating, allergic to sentimentality.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• Maus by Art Spiegelman, the other graphic memoir people compare this to constantly, and for good reason, similar stark art style used to process an unspeakable historical trauma through family
• Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, a different kind of coming of age graphic memoir, denser and more literary, but just as emotionally exact
• Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, prose instead of comics, but covers some of the same Iranian territory from an adult, literature professor’s perspective
• The Complete Persepolis film, not a book but Satrapi’s own animated adaptation, and it’s rare that an author-directed adaptation actually improves certain scenes

You can grab a copy here: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

For your book club

1. Why do you think Satrapi chose simple, stark black and white art instead of full color or more realistic detail? What does that style let her get away with emotionally?
2. Marji lies about her uncle’s death to seem more interesting to her classmates. Did that scene change how you saw her as a narrator for the rest of the book?
3. Does the Vienna section feel like a natural continuation of the story to you, or a different book wearing the same character?
4. How does the book handle the difference between the Iran that Western media shows and the Iran Marji actually grew up in?
5. Satrapi is unflinching about her own bad behavior and bad choices. Did that honesty make you trust her more or less as a narrator?