Post #77 – Women’s Memoirs, Book & Video Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Memoir Book Review of
Things I’ve Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi
Reviewed by Diana Y. Paul
In the prologue to her memoir Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter
“I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.”
Growing up in Tehran, Azar overcomes a narcissistic, self-destructive mother we all are familiar with: through either personal experience or through reading memoirs and novels, sometimes both. Nafisi repeatedly insists that her story breaks the silence of the damage her mother caused. She ultimately moves on to shape her own story.
In the opening chapters, Nafisi describes herself as a sensitive and fiercely intellectual girl, whose all-powerful mother expresses little love or care for her. Her brother, in sharp contrast, seems to benefit from the doting attention their mother lavishes on him. At first, the mother is demonized by the young author who is the victim of repeated rage and humiliation. The object of her unquestioning affection, Nafisi’s father, on the other hand, is sanctified, adored and idolized. She admits conspiring to keep secrets from her mother, which draws her even closer to her father.
“He was charming and sociable and was more fun than my mother, who seemed to have made a pact never to enjoy herself” (p.107)
This rather conventional but evocative pattern –good father, evil mother–transforms very slowly and with a raw and savage honesty into the realization that her mother is a disappointed, self-destructive woman due to the insufferable indignities of her own childhood and to her husband’s considerable selfishness. To the author’s credit, she tries nobly to filter out each parent’s contribution to an acrid marriage filled with loathing and incriminations.
It is a complex extended family filled with gossipy, sometimes lecherous relatives who yield tremendous power outside the family circle as well. Nafisi seems compelled to introduce the intricacies of Iran’s political, religious, and literary traditions, but I thought the volume of information, while worthwhile to understand, results in eviscerating the riveting family dynamic that should be the focus and arc of any memoir. Perhaps the author needed relief from revealing her family’s secrets by breaking the narrative and segueing into reminiscences of history and myth.
For example, at one point the father, brother and Nafisi imagine killing the mother to eliminate their misery or, alternatively, to make a triple suicide pact to “teach her a lesson.” This horrifying fantasy is buried in layers of retelling Iranian history.
“Another woman gone to waste”, a theme that worms its way through the story, is voiced in potent scenes. The author eventually realizes her mother’s broken dreams explain “how she can be so cruel to herself and to those she loves”. This realization is heartbreaking, not only for the author but for all who read of this intelligent woman, who once dreamt of being a doctor, and now felt defeated and resentful. She became “a woman gone to waste,” one who could not help lying to herself, to all around her, with no way out. Her mother “treats her daughter the same way her stepmother treated her. If you didn’t know better you would think she wasn’t her mother” (p.146).
The author’s mother does have a brief moment of glory–as the secretary of Parliament–and the narrative reflects her mother’s fleeting potential. Nafisi, in what must have been a very painful confession, admits: “I had lied to myself, and in a sense betrayed my own ideals of the kind of woman I aspired to be” (p.178) when she realizes that she accepted a marriage proposal to escape the bitterly unloving relationship she had with her mother. Her own mother had done the same thing: escaped a failed relationship with her (step-)mother through an early marriage. “Sometimes I caught myself looking in the mirror and seeing my mother’s face” (p.302). “I had to let go as well, let go of her, stop resisting her at every turn” (p.303). The act of resistance itself wounded her deeply.
While no one can get inside another’s psyche, I would have liked the author to imagine her mother’s intentions and more of her mother’s secrets: a woman unloved, who vacillates between loving and unloving, in the only way she can think of. This reader still believes the author is resisting and dealing with the unhealed wound she can’t leave behind, years after her mother has died. That journey, especially since it is still underway, is gut-wrenching to read.
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Diana Y. Paul, in addition to writing memoir and video reviews for Women’s Memoirs, blogs at: http://unhealedwound.com
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If you are a Kindle reader, here’s the link to Things I’ve Been Silent About
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