Tied both to the West and the Middle East, her point of view achieves a balanced view of a culture often misunderstood as simply repressive, and recovers the intoxicating, often sensuous details of Iranian life. Bahrampour's book tour recently brought her to San Francisco and Salon's offices. I was struck by the image of your house, the quintessential image of Iranian houses, with these high walls around them and gardens inside. In Iran, there's this huge separation between public and private. And so from the outside the houses just look like these bare, dilapidated walls, but inside it's really another world.
People love their gardens and they grow all kinds of fruit.
They usually have a little pool or a pond with goldfish. It was about the same. I was very sheltered from the restrictiveness of Iran, so I think probably someone who had grown up in a more traditional household would have felt that difference more. One of my favorite episodes in your book is when you played Barbies, and you and your friend found some black cloth and decided to make a chador for Barbie so she could make the pilgrimage to Mecca. A lot of little girls were playing Barbies and I think the government wanted to have a more Iranian role model, so they created dolls that were based on characters in the school book all elementary school kids read.