Nylon Road: A Graphic Memoir of Coming of Age in Iran
Multitalented artist and feminist Bashi offers up a memoir that complements, without imitating, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003). She and Satrapi have a few significant details in common. Both were youths during the Iranian Revolution, both eventually traveled west to live in Switzerland, and both chose to tell their stories and opinions in graphic novels. Bashi, however, doesn’t just tell her story to readers unknown. She organizes her story for herself, or the selves she has been at different ages, with different information and in different cultural contexts. Each brief chapter shows her being “visited” by a past self—the idealist teen, the abused and religious young wife, the brokenhearted mother, the new immigrant, and so forth—who argues against her present choices. This is broader than a coming-of-age memoir, following into early middle age Bashi’s development of her art and her politics as well as her sense of self. The art is flat and cartoony and provides a wealth of detail about emotions as well as culturally specific settings. --Francisca Goldsmith