Nostalgia for a lost nation in diasporic Iranian memoir

[para. 1]: "In this first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, diasporic Iranians, many of them women, are deploying the autobiographical form to narrate their personal experiences of life in post-revolutionary Iran and in the diaspora. The explosion of life writing in North America since the 1990s, and the growing market demand for such autobiographical narratives, has been referred to as the “memoir boom.” At the forefront of what we can now call the diasporic Iranian women’s memoir boom are two texts, both published in 1999: Tara Bahrampour’s To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America and Gelareh Asayesh’s Saffron Sky: A Life between Iran and America. These autobiographies are the first among a now substantial corpus of texts by a generation of diasporic Iranian women, many of whom experienced the 1979 Iranian revolution in childhood and then immigrated to the West with their families. The predominant sentiment in these texts, nostalgia for a lost childhood, is thus deeply bound up with nostalgia for a lost (pre-revolutionary) nation.