From the author of The Last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage comes a raw, urgent, and unflinching odyssey of exile, identity, and defiance. Dead Iranian Girl charts Roxana Shirazis real-life attempt to smuggle herself across the Iranian border in a desperate bid to revisit her childhood home and reclaim the culture that shaped her.
Despite the critical acclaim and international success of her first memoir, Shirazi was devastatedif not entirely shockedto learn she was no longer welcome in the country of her birth. Her graphic, impassioned writing about female sexuality had been branded an unforgivable crime by the Islamic Republic. Yet what concerned her most was backlash from the West, where media and institutions dismissed her as the wrong kind of immigrant and silenced her voice. Along the way, she also recounts her immersion in underworld circles, including a fraught relationship with a Los Angeles mafia boss, underscoring the extremes she navigated in search of belonging, survival, and truth.
