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Intro
Marjane is 14 when she arrives in Vienna, thrilled that she escaped the Iran-Iraq War and the religious fundamentalism of her home country, Iran. She expects to live with a family friend named Zozo and attend school at the local French school. But after 11 days together, Zozo drops Marjane off at a Catholic boarding house. This living situation is okay with Marjane, because it makes her feel independent and more like an adult. But when Marjane meets her roommate, Lucia, the girls realize they have a problem: Marjane doesn’t speak German, while Lucia doesn’t speak French or Persian.
School is a challenge. Marjane hasn’t spoken French in a few years, so students either tease her for her rusty language skills or ignore her altogether. Eventually, an older girl named Julie takes an interest in Marjane and introduces her to her friends Momo, Thierry, and Olivier. Momo is obsessed with death and war, so Marjane is an intriguing addition to their friend group. When Christmas vacation rolls around, none of Marjane’s friends care that she doesn’t celebrate Christmas. Fortunately, Lucia invites Marjane to join her and her family in the Tyrol. Lucia’s parents make Marjane feel welcome and loved. However, Marjane isn’t thrilled when weeks later, she learns that there’s going to be yet another vacation. Momo insists that Marjane should learn to enjoy vacation and take the opportunity to educate herself. Though Marjane thinks Momo is a jerk, she knows she needs to learn more so she can fit in in Europe. She spends the entire vacation reading. Near the end, though, the Mother Superior catches Marjane eating pasta out of a pot and comments that Iranians don’t have manners. When Marjane insults the Mother Superior in return, the Mother Superior kicks Marjane out.
Marjane moves in with Julie and Julie’s mother, Armelle. Julie explains sex to Marjane and is rude to her mother, which are behaviors that Marjane finds shocking—in Iran, parents are considered sacred, while sex is taboo. When Armelle leaves on a work trip, Julie throws a party. Marjane doesn’t enjoy the party and is shocked when she hears Julie and her latest partner having sex. After this, Marjane tries to impress her friends by pretending to smoke joints, but she feels like she’s betraying her culture and values.
Marjane then moves to a communal house inhabited by eight young gay men. Around this time, she also undergoes puberty at a shocking speed. When Mom comes for visit a visit, she doesn’t even recognize Marjane because she’s grown so much. And to Marjane’s surprise, Mom’s hair is gray. They spend their visit walking and talking, and Mom helps Marjane rent an apartment from an ugly woman named Frau Doctor Heller. Marjane realizes that her parents have no idea how difficult life is for her in Vienna.
Living with Frau Doctor Heller is a challenge—for one thing, she doesn’t think it’s a problem that her dog poops in Marjane’s bed. By this time, Marjane’s friends have all moved away. Fortunately, she has an older boyfriend named Enrique. He’s a real anarchist and invites her to a party at a commune. Marjane is excited until she discovers that the anarchists play games like hide-and-seek. That night, she decides to lose her virginity, but nothing happens between her and Enrique. In the morning, Enrique tells Marjane a secret: he’s gay.
Following the breakup, Marjane spends more time with her friend Ingrid and the anarchists at the commune. To cope with her loneliness, she starts doing more drugs and throws herself into finding someone to have sex with her. Just as she’s ready to give up, Marjane meets Markus. Things are rocky from the start. Markus’s mother is racist and refuses to allow Markus and Marjane to spend time together in her home. Meanwhile, Frau Doctor Heller accuses Marjane of prostitution. Marjane and Markus spend a lot of time smoking in Markus’s car. When Markus asks Marjane to purchase drugs for him, she complies—and becomes her school’s drug dealer. The next school year is difficult for Marjane. Though she stops selling drugs, she takes more drugs herself and barely passes her final exams. She’s disappointed and knows her parents would be, too.
On her 18th birthday, Marjane discovers Markus in bed with another woman. Later that morning, when Frau Doctor Heller accuses Marjane of stealing, Marjane walks out and spends the next two months on the streets. It’s winter, so Marjane develops bronchitis and ends up in the hospital. She decides it’s silly that she almost let love kill her when she survived war and revolution in Iran. After the doctor gives her a clean bill of health, Marjane arranges with her parents for her to come home, as long as they promise not to ask about what happened.
Mom and Dad don’t recognize Marjane when she finds them at the airport. On her first day back in Tehran, Marjane walks the streets and is disturbed—now, the streets are named for martyrs. That evening, Dad explains what happened in the final weeks of the war: after Iranian militants tried to overthrow the Iranian regime, the government executed thousands of imprisoned intellectuals. This makes Marjane feel like what happened to her in Vienna was inconsequential. She vows to never talk about her “Viennese misadventures.” Grudgingly, Marjane agrees to see family members and friends. Her grandmother is the only family member she really wants to see. After most of Marjane’s friends turn out to be shallow, Marjane seeks out Kia, one of her best childhood friends. He served in the war and is now disabled, but he’s as funny as ever. After Kia leaves Iran to seek medical treatment in the United States, Marjane’s depression worsens. She wants to tell everyone what happened in Vienna so they’ll pity her, but she stays silent. Eventually, Mom forces Marjane to join her friends on a skiing trip. Her friends make her depression even worse when they learn she’s had sex with more than one man. They ask if she’s any different from a whore. Thus, Marjane returns home more depressed than ever. When antidepressants and counseling fail to help, attempts suicide. When she survives, she decides it’s a sign that she’s supposed to live. Marjane remakes herself into a coiffed, sophisticated woman.
Not long after, Marjane meets her future husband, Reza, at a friend’s party. They’re both painters—and Reza served in the Iran-Iraq War. Despite their many differences, they complement each other. They quickly begin planning a future together. Though Reza wants to leave Iran, the couple decides instead to attend art school in Iran. They study hard for their entrance exams and both get in. Once they receive their admissions decisions, their future together seems secure. This sense of security leads Marjane and Reza to start picking on each other. Because Reza doesn’t think Marjane wears enough makeup, Marjane makes herself up heavily for one of their dates. But as she waits for Reza, she sees the Guardians of the Revolution coming—and knows they’ll arrest her for wearing makeup. To save herself, she accuses a strange man of yelling obscene things at her. When she tells Reza about it, he thinks this is hilarious. Later, when Marjane tells her grandmother, her grandmother calls Marjane a “selfish bitch.”
At school, Marjane befriends several female classmates. Several weeks into the school year, all university students gather for a lecture on “moral and religious conduct.” The speaker insists that women must dress conservatively to honor the martyrs, but Marjane pushes back—the university seems obsessed with policing women’s clothing, not with ensuring its students’ morality. Fortunately, a religious school administrator allows Marjane to design uniforms for the female art students that follow the dress code and give art students more freedom to move around. This project helps Marjane make up with her grandmother. Meanwhile, the administration and the Guardians of the Revolution constantly police women and arrest them for silly things like wearing socks, laughing loudly, or running. This, Marjane knows, is by design—women who are concerned about the dress code are too preoccupied to think about their education or the political situation. Around this time, Marjane makes friends with her more liberal classmates and they begin throwing parties. The Guardians of the Revolution regularly break these up, but it doesn’t worry Marjane much until one friend dies during a raid.
By Marjane’s second year of college, Marjane and Reza decide to marry. Marjane talks her decision over with Dad, who she learns later knew that Marjane and Reza would go on to get divorced. The wedding is a huge, lavish affair. Marjane immediately regrets getting married—but it’s too late. It only takes a month before Marjane and Reza are at each other’s throats. They set up separate bedrooms and never go out together. Around the same time, Marjane’s friends and parents acquire satellite dishes that allow them to watch Western television. Marjane spends most of her time watching TV on her parents’ couch until Dad suggests that Marjane is wasting her life. Marjane sees that Dad is right. She makes new friends and reapplies herself to her education.
One of Marjane and Reza’s advisors assigns them a joint final thesis. They spend seven months designing a theme park inspired by Iranian mythology and don’t fight at all. Though their thesis earns full marks, Tehran’s deputy mayor refuses to let Marjane and Reza take the project past the design stage—the government only cares about religious symbols, not Iranian mythology. After this failure, Marjane begins to think seriously about getting a divorce. One friend tells Marjane to stay married unless Reza is abusive, while Marjane’s grandmother (who’s been divorced herself) insists that divorce is a good thing.
Around this time, Marjane gets a job as an illustrator for a magazine. Like most of her colleagues, she’s enraged when the government arrests one coworker for a supposedly offensive cartoon. She thinks of her coworker as a hero. But when Marjane goes to visit him and sees how he talks over his wife, she realizes she can’t simply live in Iran anymore. Marjane divorces Reza and applies to an art college in France. She spends her final months in Iran with her parents and her grandmother, who are supportive of her move. Though leaving Iran gives Marjane her freedom, that freedom comes at a cost—Marjane only sees her grandmother once more before her grandmother’s death.
