It's difficult imagining Azar Nafisi silent. Words pour from her rouged lips between sips of tea in the Watergate building of Washington, her adopted city. The Iranian emigre and author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books knows life under tyranny and doesn't take free speech for granted.
That 2003 best-seller told of the clandestine reading group Nafisi held over two years for seven female students who, upon entering her Tehran home each week, would remove their chadors and discuss banned Western novels.
But for the five years spent writing her follow-up memoir, Things I've Been Silent About: Memories, which sets the torments of her dysfunctional family against Iran's historical turmoil, Nafisi fought an inner censor far more punishing than the Iranian theocrats. 'It's been the toughest thing that I have ever done,' she says, nursing a backache.
Its release next month marks the end of a long tug-of-war with her publisher in which she'd hand over and then retract the manuscript, insisting she wouldn't see it to print.
Nafisi was writing a book about the social importance of the humanities in 2003 when her mother, Nezhat, died. She set the project aside to chronicle three generations of Iranian women - her maternal grandmother, her mother and herself. But the following year her father, Ahmad, unexpectedly succumbed, and the focus of the family history expanded.
As a child, Nafisi bonded with Ahmad against her mother's tyranny, but by the end of his life - when she'd left Iran to teach literature at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies - their relationship soured.
Ahmad dismayed his daughter by divorcing Nezhat at an age when she had few prospects of remarrying. 'When he left her, she had nothing - she had no power, she could not complain,' Nafisi says. 'I saw how disadvantaged a woman becomes in a society where her rights are limited. She was so alone.'