Once Marjane moves back home, she learns how a person can combine different aspects of their identity into a cohesive whole: they should simply discover and pursue what makes them happy. She thus realizes the importance of bridging the part of her that wants to fit in with the part of her that wants to remain true to who she is: a proud Iranian Muslim woman and a believer in women’s independence. In this sense, then, Marjane’s attempt to fit in turns her into someone she knows she doesn’t like and who she knows her parents wouldn’t appreciate either-and Marjane still deeply craves her parents’ approval.
She feels ashamed about using drugs, though she simultaneously relies on them more and more to escape this shame. Using drugs and procuring them for her friends might make Marjane popular, but her parents’ warning that drugs turn people into vegetables rings in Marjane’s head. Indeed, Marjane takes issue in particular with her own heavy drug use. Nevertheless, she recognizes that her intellectual and physical experiments don’t always help her be the person she wants to be. Marjane immerses herself in the works of Sartre, cuts her hair and begins wearing heavy eyeliner, and even becomes her school’s resident drug supplier. In Vienna, this desire to fit in leads Marjane to study political theory and philosophy, to experiment with drugs, and to alter her appearance so as to stand out less. But to someone from a different culture, those attempts can look wildly misguided. Marjane also discovers that no matter where a young person lives, the desire to fit in is often overwhelming. This sends the message that no matter where Marjane goes, she can’t win: she’ll always be too liberal or too conservative in at least one regard. This issue with sex is only one area in which Marjane finds herself on the outs, both in Vienna and in Tehran. But even to her sexually curious friends in Tehran, Marjane finds that she’s an outsider-they ask, for instance, whether Marjane is any better than a sex worker given that she’s had sex with more than one man. Marjane ends up having several sexual experiences of her own while in Vienna-though when she returns to Iran years later, she doesn’t necessarily think of herself as being as promiscuous as many of her European friends. Thus, although Marjane came from Iran believing that she was liberal in her thinking about gender relations and sex, her friends find her embarrassingly innocent and conservative. For instance, in Vienna, Marjane is shocked by her friends’ sexual activity and their openness about it-in Iran, people who have premarital sex go to great lengths to hide it. No matter where in the world Marjane is, she consistently finds that her friends-if not she herself-view her identity as oppositional to the dominant culture. The memoir makes the case that to some degree, this is a black and white decision-a person must decide where to live, after all-but it’s also possible to bridge the gaps between cultures and form a multicultural identity. As Marjane comes of age and attempts to figure out who she is, she must also figure out whether she feels more comfortable in Europe or in Iran. Iranian-born Marjane believes that “I would always be an Iranian in the West, and a Westerner in Iran.” This encapsulates one of the memoir’s central conflicts: as Marjane moves back and forth between Iran (her home country) and Austria (where she goes to school), she must constantly adjust her understanding of social norms-often with only limited success.
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