On a cold night in 1978, seven-year-old I clung to my mother in a Tehran apartment as gunshots rang out in the street: the Iranian Revolution was at hand. My family and I survived that night, but as the Islamic fundamentalists took power, I grew up watching my father take his beloved books away to burn, his friends be arrested and disappear, and women like my mother grow ever more marginalized. Confused by my father’s communist ideology, my mother’s conservative religious beliefs, and the regime’s oppressive rules, I developed a deep longing to live a different life.