The reader will find none of this crucial historical context mentioned in Reading Lolita in Tehran. Not only would it distract from the text's portrayal of the grim-faced psychopaths governing contemporary Iran as archetypal monstrosities that have somehow sprung fully formed from the darkest reaches of the human unconscious, but it might also give those forces a degree of historical rationale and taint the utopian view of the United States. One might say that Nafisi's use of the memoir form has a strategic advantage here, allowing for a ground-level personal perspective that need not be concerned with much beyond the phenomenological experience of living under a clear and ever-present tyranny—certainly not with the untidy twists and turns of history.

XREF: Relates to broader discussions of how memoir as a genre can selectively frame political narratives and implicitly serve ideological ends.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 221