My Name Is Iran: A Memoir » (Reprint)

Davar Ardalan is an award-winning producer for NPR's Morning Edition. In a three-part Morning Edition series produced with American RadioWorks that aired in February 2004, she traced her personal journey as well as Iran's struggle for a lawful society, twenty-five years after the 1979

Islamic Revolution.

A century of family tales from two beloved but divided homelands, Iran and America

Drawing on her remarkable personal history, NPR producer Davar Ardalan brings us the lives of three generations of women and their ordeals with love, rejection, and revolution. Her American grandmother's love affair with an Iranian physician took her from New York to Iran in 1931. Ardalan herself moved from San Francsico to rural Iran in 1964 with her Iranian American parents who barely spoke Farsi. After her parents' divorce, Ardalan joined her father in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he had gone to make a new life; however improbably, after high school, Ardalan decided to move back to an Islamic Iran. When she arrived, she discovered a world she hardly recognized, and one which demands a near-complete renunciation of the freedoms she experienced in the West. In time, she and her young family make the opposite migration and discover the difficulties, however paradoxical, inherent in living a free life in America.

Publishers Weekly

Ardalan, senior producer at NPR's Morning Edition, records in wooden bits and pieces the history of her Iranian family, both into and out of America. Ardalan (her given first name is Iran) is the granddaughter of an enterprising Bakhtiari tribesman who attended the American mission school in Tehran and graduated from Syracuse Medical School in 1926 at age 54; together with Ardalan's grandmother, an adventurous American nurse from Idaho, they moved to Iran to start both a hospital and a family of seven children. Ardalan, born in San Francisco in 1964, grew up largely in Iran (her father was a Kurdish architect, and her mother a writer and translator). In 1980 she returned to America, where she adopted her middle name to avoid censure, but three years later, in the most arresting segment of the memoir, Ardalan recounts her return to Tehran at age 18 to accept an arranged marriage and become a Shiite Muslim. Eventually she attended journalism school in New Mexico, endured two divorces and had four children over the years of building her career. While her prose is plain, Ardalan's testimony to the feminist spirit of the pioneering women in her family, and in the face of centuries-long strictures against the advancement of women, is a supreme achievement. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

From America to Iran, 1964-66     1
West Meets East, 1927     23
The Bakhtiars and the Ardalans     39
My Childhood     76
Mysteries of Life Unfold     96
Struggling with Reality, 1976-79     120
The Islamic Revolution     129
America and Back to Iran, 1980-83     141
Tehran, 1983-87     152
Married Life in Revolutionary Iran     158
Becoming a Mother     179
Back to the West     196
Beginning a New Life     232
Crisis of Identity     261
Discovering a Great-Grandfather     265
Sorrow and Triumph     275
Finding Myself Through Love     282
My Name Is Iran     293
Author's Note, April 17, 2006     297
Notes     299
Bibliography     316
Acknowledgments     321