My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir by Zarah Ghahramani with RobertHillman

My pink shoes... were what I would now call "slip-ons" ---flat soles, no laces or buckles, a bit like ballet shoes.  The front of each one was ornamented with an artificial flower, a darker pink than the body of the shoe.  When I was six, those shoes expressed more about the world in which I wanted to live than anything I could possibly have put into words.  In a strange way, those pink shoes and my appetite for the places I might go in them led me, after many twists and turns, to a cell in Evin Prison. -p. 13



The depth of our grieving has to do with the importance of love in our culture.  This may sound very strange to Westerners who have been encouraged to adopt a cartoon-version of Iranians---suicide bombers, warmongers, religious zealots.  But love is the more important thing to grasp when you study Iranians. -p. 29



Iranians fall in love in exactly the same was as everyone else in the world. Muslims fall in love in the same way as everyone else in the world.  Young women in vestments that reach from the crowns of their heads to their toes fall in love in the same way, by the same process, roused by the same emotions as young women everywhere. -p. 44



But no sooner had I admitted that the man I loved was in effect my political enemy than I began that process, common to women all over the world, I believe, that is supposed to conclude with the conversion of the beloved to one's point of view. Women marry alcoholics, telling themselves that they will change them, that love will change them; they marry wife beaters, believing the same thing---the beloved fellow will see the light; they marry philanderers, believing that constnat affection and the daily evidence of one's devotion will see the beloved settle happily for blissful domesticity.  It is almost an occupational hazard of being female, this profound conviction that love will bring about desired change. Perhaps it is a form of egocentricity.  Perhaps there is a type of arrogance in women which compels them to believe that love is so vital that even a benighted fool will eventually give up his appalling habits.  There is certainly no evidence to support this conviction, no anywhere in the world that exists here and now or in history.  Settings one's better judgement aside to marry a man on the basis of one's convictions about the goodness in him rising to the top like cream on milk is surely a folly. -pp. 56-57