Hacker News

> All of which are understandable for someone who has been through such a traumatic turn of events, however it was a bit sad that the young, rebellious child that was so likable did not seem to survive the conflict.

Great literature does not exist to be heartwarming but to speak fundamental truths, however uncomfortable they are. Persepolis cleaned up as you implicitly desire would cease to be the great work that it is.

It was exactly the depression and confusion in the second part that made me feel her humanity and thus deepened mine.

It is an incredible book and I feel grateful for it.

There's a parallel in Maus, where the PoV character runs increasingly into his Holocaust survivor's father's racism, even as he explores his father's threading the needle of 20th century Central Europe[1] . He calls his pa out on it, but for his pa the schwarzers aren't people, so there's no "there" there.

If Speigelman had a slightly deeper historical insight he might have drawn the connection between the byzantine precision of American race law and what Hitler had hoped to accomplish in his own "Wild West". Both end products of the secular wave of colonialism, with Hitler's being at least a hundred years too late, held back by the late stage of German nationhood.

Suffering is no guarantor of virtue. Extremes of violence can brutalize not just individuals but entire peoples. Which is why we should not look to victims as prima facie exemplars, but with empathy and deeper understanding.

[1] the "Bloodlands" of Tim Snyder

Do all stories need to be of virtue and success?

It seems like you're disappointed it wasn't a modern "noble savage" myth, that it was realistic instead of a fairy tale about a person coming from a bad place to a good place and being happy, wholesome, and free.

This kind of mythology is a pretty big problem in the western world right now as is the kneejerk reaction to it.

I’ve always wondered how much of the second part is truth and how much is fiction. That a teenage girl from Iran, living by herself in Central Europe with essentially no local connections, would become a drug dealer to her classmates, and on top of that somehow be let off the hook for it by the headmaster, stretches credibility a little bit.

In a previous life I used to model insurance payouts for residential mortgages. The average we used was within 7 years.

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widowhood_effect

Does it say what happened?

Died of sadness did make me wonder about something self inflicted.

you don't even have to be partners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Cocteau#Death

Thank you for this comment. Especially on a forum as focused on optimization of health, peptide therapy etc. You made my day a bit better.

It's incomplete without the rest of the sentence: "a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life"

Grief is not just metaphorical, severe bereavement can affect health in very real ways.

I didn't realize there was a movie. Thanks for posting so I can check it out.

I will second, the graphic novel is excellent. Up there with Maus in terms of showing you a new perspective.

The book is beautiful too, I recommend it.

At least to the kind of Iranians who were sending their children to French schools, yes.

But of course the other kind of people very rarely have someone writing international bestsellers on their behalf, so this is all we’ll get.

> Born Nov. 22, 1969, in Rasht, Iran, and grew up in Tehran. Sent to live in Austria at 14 during the Iran-Iraq war. Returned to Iran after her high school years and attended art school in Tehran.

> Left Iran for Europe again at 24 and continued her art studies in Strasbourg, France.

> Now lives in Paris as a French citizen. Since publishing "Persepolis," has not been back to Iran.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/0...

There were two large exile groups subsequent to the Iranian revolution: France and Albania. MEK has a large presence in both. I don't know enough of the history to say whether France was chosen because there was _already_ an affinity or not, but interestingly "merci" is one of the common ways to say "thank you" in Persian.

That she's French-Iranian?

It says so right in the title so I may have misunderstood your question.

I guess kind of like Gabriel Garcia and Mexico, though I don't think Columbians would like anyone to describe him as having been Mexican (ex as Mexican-Columbian) in any way though he lived there for the majority of his life and had become very well integrated into the elite circles of Mexico city -that said, he never renounced his Columbian citizenship and I think he also considered himself Columbian and not Mexican --which makes sense, he was not born there and none of his parents were from there.

France was historically very interested in the Near and Middle East, though colonially somewhat less successful than the UK; Napoleon sailed to Egypt in 1799, and later the French Republic protected Lebanese and Syrian Christians, up to some point in history. People from the Levant still like to study in France (incl. Nassim Nicholas Taleb). Hence, France is considered a strong and culturally developed country in the region.

And unlike the UK and US, they had no historic bad blood with Iran (Mossadegh et al.)