Roxana Shirazi

Dead Iranian Girl

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 Shirazi's perilous journey back to Iran through the Middle East, getting smuggled on horseback across borders under false identities, risking prison, torture, even execution. Despite the critical acclaim and international success of her first memoir, Shirazi was devastated—if not entirely shocked—to 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 Iranian woman and silenced her voice. With unflinching honesty and raw lyricism, Shirazi recounts her childhood under revolution, her exile in the UK, and her dangerous return to Tehran decades later. Along the way, she exposes the double lives of ordinary Iranians navigating dictatorship, the brutality of state repression, the electric vibrancy of underground culture, and her own search for belonging in a fractured world. Moving between past and present, Shirazi confronts the tumultuous fallout of her debut—her professional erasure, an affair with a legendary rock star, even an undercover journey into an Alabama Ku Klux Klan compound—while retracing her childhood in Tehran: a city alive with pre- and post-Revolution upheaval, political resistance, addiction, abuse, and her mother’s fierce but fragile resilience. Bold, lyrical, and uncompromising, Dead Iranian Girl is a reckoning with belonging—what it means to be from somewhere, what it costs to be cast out, and the relentless, aching pull of home.