The Complete Persepolis

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Satrapi’s case is that a country is not the same thing as its government, and that the way to prove it is not to argue but to draw. Writing in Paris in the late 1990s, she found Iran came up in Western conversation almost only in connection with “fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism.” Her answer was a memoir in comics about one girl in Tehran: arguing with God, smuggling home a denim jacket, watching an uncle taken away. Her stated principle is that “an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists,” and the book makes that case by declining to be about a nation at all. It is about a family. The Complete Persepolis collects both halves — The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return — Tehran to Vienna to Tehran to the departure that finally stuck.

Marjane Satrapi on SummaryShelf

The Complete Persepolis