To See and See Again

A Life in Iran and America by Tara Bahrampour A fascinating, bicultural look at upper-middle-class life in pre- and post-Revolution Iran. When she was eleven years old, Tara Bahrampour arrived in America with her family and five suitcases. Her American mother and Iranian father were fleeing Iran’s Islamic Revolution. In the 1990s, she was the first member of her family to go back to Iran to visit her extended family and come to terms, as an adult, with the world she might have grown up in. To See and See Again is about three generations of a privileged Iranian family and about life in exile. Bahrampour describes the exotic Iran of her childhood; her family’s attempt to lead a working-class life in Oregon; and her return to post-Revolution Iran, where she attends secret rock-and-roll parties, bakes bread with Kurdish separatists, and revisits her family’s lost feudal empire, following the trail of Iran’s volatile history with the West as she herself discovers how to synthesize both worlds. Compelling and lyrical, To See and See Again explores the complexity of the modern immigrant experience while offering an intimate portrait of a closed world on the verge of transformation