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Start giftingThey Said They Wanted Revolution
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Learn moreFrom a daughter of Iranian revolutionaries, activists, immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers comes a gripping and emotional memoir of family and the tumultuous history of two nations.
In 1979, Neda Toloui-Semnani’s parents left the United States for Iran to join the revolution. But the promise of those early heady days in Tehran was warped by the rise of the Islamic Republic. With the new regime came international isolation, cultural devastation, and profound personal loss for Neda. Her father was arrested and her mother was forced to make a desperate escape, pregnant and with Neda in tow.
Conflicted about her parents’ choices for years, Neda realized that to move forward, she had to face the past head-on. Through extensive reporting, journals, and detailed interviews, Neda untangles decades of history in a search for answers.
Both an epic family drama and a timely true-life political thriller, They Said They Wanted Revolution illuminates the costs of righteous activism across generations.
Neda Toloui-Semnani is an Emmy award–winning writer and producer. She is currently a senior writer at the television news magazine VICE News Tonight, and her work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Washington Post, Kinfolk, New York, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Baffler, The Week, BuzzFeed, and Roll Call among others. She’s been featured on The Rumpus and This American Life. She was named a 2018 fellow with the Logan Nonfiction Program and a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA fellow in Nonfiction Literature.
She holds a master of science in gender and social policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a master of fine arts in nonfiction from Goucher College.
She grew up in Washington, DC, and is based in Brooklyn where she lives with a small dog, a large cat, a fat baby, and a man she calls Stretch.
Reviews
“The book is both richly reflective, informative, and tender in its characterizations…a generous and heartfelt search for personal and familial identity.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[Neda] Toloui-Semnani movingly reflects on how disconnected she felt from her Iranian roots while growing up in Washington, D.C., and weaves in diary excerpts and correspondence from her first trip back to Iran, in 2003. The result is an intimate and vital study of the Iranian diaspora.” —Publishers Weekly
“Illuminating, poignant. An inspiring read.” —Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
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