Was It Worth It?
Description
When intelligence agents storm Maryam Rafiee's Tehran home and assault her for refusing to surrender her laptop, she faces a question that will haunt her for years: Was fighting back worth it? Days later, fleeing to Canada with bruises still fresh on her arms, she carries this question--and many others--into exile.
In this searing memoir, Rafiee chronicles her journey from a young woman defying Iran's gender apartheid to a tireless advocate for her father's freedom. Her interconnected stories span decades and continents: ration lines during the Iran-Iraq War, secret bicycle rides through Tehran, discrimination in a Toronto grocery store, 50,000 protesters chanting "Woman, Life, Freedom."
This is the story of a daughter who fights to free her imprisoned father from across an ocean, a woman who discovers that even democratic countries have their own forms of discrimination, and an immigrant who must learn to carry home within herself when she can no longer return to it. Above all, it's a meditation on the complicated arithmetic of freedom--where the cost is everything, but the alternative is unthinkable.
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Persons
Maryam Rafiee immigrated to Canada in 2014 and is a lawyer based in Toronto. She is the author of Dear Baba: A Story Through Letters.
Adam Braver is the author of seven novels (MR. LINCOLN'S WARS, DIVINE SARAH, CROWS OVER THE WHEATFIELD, NOVEMBER 22, 1963, MISFIT, THE DISAPPEARED. and REJOICE THE HEAD OF PAUL McCARTNEY). His books have been selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers program, Borders' Original Voices series, the IndieNext list, and twice for the Book Sense list, as well as having been translated into Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and French. Braver's fiction and essays have appeared in journals such as Daedalus, Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Water-Stone Review, Harvard Review, Tin House, The Normal School, West Branch, The Pinch, and Post Road. Additionally, Braver is editor for the BROKEN SILENCE series for the University of New Orleans Press, a series that tells the firsthand stories of political dissidents. He is the Library Program Director at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI, where is also on faculty. Braver also teaches at the New York State Summer Writers Institute.