Having too many books is a blessing. This is most obvious, of course, when one finishes a book and stretches their hand out to grab the next thing to read. The fact that I don’t need to even go to the book store1 to have a wide selection of enticing reading options is, in my mind, the sign of a life well lived. Some people (my long-suffering partner included) may see chaotic stacks lacking all rhyme or reason. I see the best reason of all: possibilities.
So it was last week, when I finished a book, stretched out my proverbial hand, and it fell upon my copy of Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi’s recent and tragically young passing encouraged me to grab it. It’s a 20th anniversary edition and I’ve had it sense it came out, so since 2023, but had never read it. I’m not typically a fan of graphic novels,2 but Persepolis’s broad acclaim and my desire to cure my comparative ignorance about Iran drew me to it.
I didn’t really know what to expect, other than it was a comic about her life. What I found was surprisingly charming, despite describing horrors and fears and the incredible anxieties of growing up in turmoil and across cultures. Satrapi’s coming of age story is a roiling story, suffused with pain and alienation. Not only her own, but that of her family, friends, and the people around her during the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
The book blends humor and sorrow in potent combination. Satrapi manages to poke fun at herself and her loved ones against a backdrop of repression and war. She plays her perpetual reinventions of herself for good comedic effect. She also brings out the joy that she and the people around her managed to eke out during bleak and horrifying times. Her descriptions of buying black market tapes and her parents smuggling posters for her back from Europe stitched into clothes are testament to people’s need for art and joy.
One thing I found surprisingly charming was the art style. It’s deceptively simple, with figures rendered with minimal detail against flat backgrounds. This simplicity, however, allows Satrapi leeway to change the style in very subtle ways to great effect. The minimalism means that any addition or stylistic shift is obvious and impactful. In one section detailing a growth spurt between 15 and 16, Satrapi draws a dedicated panel to each minor change in her face, resulting in caricatures so evocative that I both felt genuine sympathy for her and laughing out loud at the same time.
Throughout the book is a sad wistfulness for lost futures. Satrapi’s family contained government leaders from the previous democratically-elected government, slain revolutionaries, and exiles who had fled their country. She shows friends partying long into the night in private homes as an act of rebellion. Hanging over it all is a sense of hauntology, both for the individual lives these people could have lead, and for the society they could have had. This is implicitly contrasted with the “martyrs” that Satrapi is continually chided to honor, for whom the lack of a future was not a tragedy, but their whole purpose to the current regime.
Like all good autobiography, Persepolis gives a humanity to not only Satrapi herself but to the world and the people around her. I can’t claim that it’s made me some kind of expert on the Iranian Revolution or the subsequent years of war (though I did learn quite a bit), but I feel like it taught me a lot of what it was like for her and her loved ones to live through it, suffer from it, and in some cases, escape from it. It’s a deeply moving book, with just enough humor to make it also a joy to read. As Satrapi herself says:
We can only feel sorry for ourselves when our misfortunes are still supportable. Once this limit is crossed, the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it.
Though don’t think I won’t use the excuse.
Or, I suppose, graphic autobiographies in this case.