Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

In Part 2, Nafisi recalls her life in the years before the Iranian Revolution. She describes her upbringing as privileged, with a long lineage full of distinguished forebears “known for their contributions to literature and science” in Iran (84). As a child, she is educated at private schools in England and Switzerland; as a university student, she studies at the University of Oklahoma, where she finds herself attracted to left-wing revolutionary ideologies. Nafisi depicts herself as something of an outsider in her revolutionary circles, claiming that she “tried to reconcile [her] revolutionary aspirations” with the “lifestyle” she favors by nature, including dressing in a traditionally feminine way and “refus[ing] to cut [her] hair” (85).

She writes that she continued to read “counterrevolutionary writers—T. S. Eliot, Austen, Plath, Nabokov, Fitzgerald” (85-86). She claims that while her revolutionary activities gave her “an ideological framework” for channeling her passions, she “felt alienated from the movement itself” (86).

Nafisi recalls her teaching days in the wake of the Iranian Revolution at the University of Tehran. She describes the political atmosphere on campus as heated, with “a turf war going on between different political groups” (89), especially between the hardline Islamic revolutionaries and their more moderate or secular counterparts.