To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America

The daughter of an American singer and an Iranian architect does justice to both her heritages in this thoughtful memoir. Tara Bahrampour spent most of her childhood in Tehran, but in 1979 she fled from there with her family as the unfolding Islamic revolution made Iran unsafe for anyone with Western ties. While her parents struggled to make a living in the U.S., Bahrampour worked on becoming an American teenager, though she still felt strong ties to the warm, communal world she left behind. Returning for a visit in 1994, Bahrampour found a nation too complex to be properly described by political stereotypes--a transitional society where her female relatives slept in lacy negligees and watched illegal American videos, but also drove around with a tape of Khomeini's speeches in their car's cassette player. During her stay, despite some scary encounters with hostile officials, Bahrampour rediscovered a continuity she could never find anywhere else--the links to kin and to history that are alive in the Iranian landscape. This rootedness, she accepts, will never be hers as an Iranian American, yet her thoughtful examination of what she has gained and lost affirms the value of a life informed by two cultures. --Wendy Smith