Azadeh Moaveni's "Lipstick Jihad" is interesting
and well-written, but not captivating. Much of the criticism from other
reviewers revolves around her well-to-do social status and her focus on the
young, upper- and middle-class generation with which she seems to have spent
her time. Is this an "authentic" description of contemporary Iran?
Were this a work of journalism, this critique might be valid, for the book is
fully absorbed in the Islamic Republic-style perversions of the otherwise
recognizable drama of being a young adult. And one can hardly charge her with
misleading the reader on this account, as I can't think of a more apt
description of this book's focus than the subtitle itself: "A Memoir of
Growing Up Iranian in America
and American in Iran."
The appropriate question to ask is not what the subject of her book is, but how
well she has captured it. It is for this that I only give three stars. She
rides from interesting anecdote to interesting anecdote, and when discussing
her sense of being suspended between Iranian and American identities she can
really shine. But her attempts to draw perspective often left me skeptical.
She's fully capable of viewing her environment critically, but I'm not
convinced she ever transcended it, looked back and encapsulated it for her
audience.
When I finished each chapter I was not compelled to start the next and only
rarely found myself lost in its pages. I am glad I read the book, and learned
much about the political and social dimensions of life in contemporary Iran.
But a memoir's role is larger - even, in some ways, dishonest. For a memoir
must universalize the personal, must order and narrate a life that rarely comes
with either. In Moaveni's abstraction of her experience she only puts forward
an interesting read, not a great one.