TO ENJOY LIFE
A memoir of survival and self-definition.
To Enjoy Life is a memoir shaped by endurance and restraint. It examines how identity forms under pressure and how authorship becomes a means of survival. Moving between memory and reflection, the book resists confession in favor of deliberate narrative control.
Rather than offering resolution, it investigates how experience becomes meaningful only when shaped by intention. Memory is treated not as evidence, but as material—fragmented, contested, and altered by time. Voice is not discovered; it is constructed.
This is not a record of events, but an inquiry into who speaks, under what conditions, and at what cost.
For readers drawn to literary nonfiction that values complexity over consolation.
This autobiography follows a girl who loses her father to war before she can even remember his face.
She grows up in Tehran surrounded by martyr families, then is suddenly uprooted and taken to Norway as a refugee child.
In a new country, she struggles with language, isolation, racism, and a mother whose love feels conditional and controlling.
As adolescence unfolds, she is labeled fragile, medicated, and hospitalized instead of understood.
Searching for safety and belonging, she marries young, believing she has found protection.
Instead, she enters a marriage marked by jealousy, violence, and silence.
From Norway to Tehran, from Mashhad to Oslo, her life moves across borders but remains trapped in cycles of control.
Caught between cultures, between obedience and rebellion, she fights to protect her daughter while losing herself.
This is not a story about victimhood — it is a story about awareness.
It is about how manipulation hides inside love, how control disguises itself as care, and how a woman slowly reclaims her voice after years of being told she imagined everything.