My children have asked me this question many times in the past two years.  I tell them simply, “to be able to say my name is Iran.” I have been carrying this burden for almost three decades. I dropped my first name when I came to Brookline High School in 1980. The American hostages were still being held captive in Tehran and “Bomb Iran” was a common remark.  For too long, the tumultuous events surrounding Iran have made me shy away from my full identity.  But today, I have worked through my fears and replaced them with love.  I won’t be confined by any one ideology.  I am a product of my past—American and Iranian. I am proud to say “I am Iran”.  Here are some other reasons why I wrote the book:

1. To relate what it was like living through the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

2. After the revolution, to decipher the sense of fear, confusion and alienation that I felt as a teenager, living in Brookline, MA, with a name like IRAN.

3. Why it was that I dated the nephew of the former King of Iran but ended up marrying the nephew of an Islamic cleric at the age of 19.

4. To understand the Islamic heritage that I carry with me in the tradition of Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Mohammad.

5. To document the struggle of Iranian women, both religious and secular, as they demand freedom of expression and human rights.

6. To share the origins of Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam, in Persian Architecture, as taught to me by my mother, a Sufi and Islamic scholar and my father, a Harvard-trained architect.

7. To explore the powerful Persian myths and legends that make-up the psyche of Iranians.

8. To explain how back in 1927, in New York City, my fifty-five year old Iranian grandfather mesmerized my twenty-two year old American grandmother by reading her passages
from Persian poetry.  The two then went back to Iran in 1931 to start a hospital and had seven children.

9. To introduce you to my adventurous American grandmother Helen who loved Iran and Iranians. As part of President Truman’s Point Four Health Mission, she traveled by donkey, camel and her trusted Jeep through the rural villages of Iran in the 1950’s to teach the women and young girls proper healthcare.

10. To discover what a typical American man named John Smith (of Lima, Ohio) with four sons finds endearing about a woman named Iran with four children.