From Mina’s Substack
When Marjane Satrapi passed away on June 4—tragic, unexpected, and far too soon—the tributes to Persepolis were accompanied by a critique that has followed the book for years: a demand that her memoir be something other than a memoir. The most persistent version faults Satrapi for speaking from too narrow a position: a secular, upper-middle-class family affluent enough to send their daughter to Europe in the middle of the Iran-Iraq War. What is missing, critics suggest, are experiences outside her own: those of another social class, another religious background, another political formation.
That a memoir expresses the author’s experience does not place it beyond critique. It can be challenged for what it does on the page: how it represents the world and what assumptions it carries. What cannot be demanded is that the memoirist have lived a different life. The problem with such critiques is that they ask one person’s memoir to do the work of collective representation, as if Satrapi should have written the critic’s memoir, or someone else’s.
Mina Khanlarzadeh (Ph.D., Columbia University; B.Sc., Physics, Sharif University of Technology) is a historian whose interdisciplinary work engages global political thought, literary and translation studies, gender studies, and the history of science.
More content from this blog
- Reports from the past Week on Workers’ Struggles and Other Protest Movements in Iran, by Hayat Almasi and Evin Rezaei – June 2025
- Statement from Palestinian Members of the National Leadership of Standing Together – 30 January 2024
- “Incommensurate Ontologies”? Anti-Black Racism and the Question of Islam in French Algeria, by Muriam Haleh Davis – 12 February 2026
- A Report on Standing Together’s Latest Activity, by Uri Weltmann – 26 July 2025
- The Emerging Sub-Imperial Role of the United Arab Emirates in Africa, by Husam Mahjoub – 4 February 2025