"It all started with the pink shoes. As a girl in Iran in the 1980s, Zarah Ghahramani gravitated toward bright colors and lots of jewelry. She particularly loved a pair of pink slip-ons with flowers on the toes. Unfortunately, with the war against Iraq in full swing, and black the prescribed color for clothing, pink constituted a political affront. At 6, Ms. Ghahramani was already headed for trouble. In My Life as a Traitor she records, in harrowing detail, the dire consequences of indulging her defiant 'pink-shoe sensibility,' which eventually guarantees her a cell in the infamous Evin prison. There she is held for nearly a month in solitary confinement, interrogated and tortured, after taking part in student demonstrations at Tehran University. A self-described 'princess' from a well-to-do family, she sits in a room measuring 6 feet by 5 feet with no bed, listening to screams of pain echoing down the hallways. How did it come to this? Ms. Ghahramani makes a highly unlikely political prisoner, a romantic, poetry-besotted young woman whose rage at the government was a matter of personal style as much as of principle. 'Irritation at and occasional exasperation with the rigid dress code, with the hidebound ideology of the mullahs, with all the dos and don’ts that we were expected to internalize—this made up the substance of our "opposition" to the regime,' she writes of her set at the university. Rueful and half-amused, she reflects that 'not one of us could have mounted a coherent argument to back up our complaints' . . . With her collaborator, the Australian novelist Robert Hillman, Ms. Ghahramani writes in a spare, eloquent prose style that reflects both her child’s view of the world before arriving at Evin and the pared-down perceptions of her prison experience. She and her friends knew Evin was a place to avoid, she writes, 'but only in the way that the good people in children’s stories know that they must avoid the ogre’s castle.' Once inside, 'a child sent on an adult’s errand,' she turns inward and begins to mine emotional bedrock. Physically, Ms. Ghahramani gets off lightly. She is never taken to the dreaded secret room where expert torturers, practicing skills perfected in the days of the shah, apply themselves to the hard cases and special enemies. On one occasion she is thrashed with a belt outfitted with flesh-piercing prongs. She suffers two savage beatings. But she leaves prison, thanks to pressure exerted by a former boyfriend with friends in the government, without permanent injuries. She is not raped. Mental torture is another matter, and this she describes powerfully. Solitude and uncertainty eat away at her like acid. One day an interrogator simply places her in an unfamiliar room, blindfolded and tied to a chair, where she is left for hours. Her imagination and the terror of the unknown do the rest. Sensory deprivation and killing boredom break her spirit. Alone in her cell she yearns for an insect to appear, 'any sort of bug at all, just so long as I could use my vision and notice things about the bug that my brain would then go to work on.' Instead she nourishes thoughts of revenge. In salacious detail she constructs fantasies of murdering her interrogators by smashing their skulls with a hammer. They have forced her to name names, sign confessions, beg for mercy. In moments of deepest misery she senses her humanity slipping away . . . Ms. Ghahramani moved to Australia after leaving prison. She has left the revenge fantasies behind her. Nor is she a revolutionary. 'I want my pink shoes!' is her protest slogan. 'That would be enough,' she writes, 'for once the mullahs conceded my right to wear pink shoes, so much that is good and kind and wise and just plain human would follow.'"—William Grimes, The New York Times 

"If, as a student at an American college, you'd never joined a protest, raised a fist, painted a poster or marched on Washington—even out of impure motives, such as a desire for a cheap weekend away or pursuit of a beautiful activist—this might later be held against you. People might say you'd been too focused on your career—or that you'd been uncaring or unaware. The power of Zarah Ghahramani's chilling memoir, My Life as a Traitor, is in the discovery—hers and ours—that in Iran such routine student activism can have devastating consequences. In riveting prose, she and her co-author, journalist Robert Hillman, tell the story of how Ghahramani was plucked from the street after a protest against the firing of a beloved teacher, and secretly incarcerated in Tehran's notorious Evin prison, without inquiry or trial . . . Like the best-selling graphic novel series Persepolis, My Life as a Traitor is compelling for its seemingly unvarnished glimpse at the experiences of an ordinary young woman in post-1979 Iran, after the pro-U.S. shah was deposed and a fundamentalist Islamic regime took power. The memoir illuminates truths about inflexible and dictatorial regimes: There don't have to be coherent or even any reasons for consequences; injustice very often prevails; and the best and smartest ideas, and people, are routinely suppressed or swept aside."—Mary D'Ambrosio, San Francisco Chronicle

"A testimony of surviving senseless persecution, imprisonment, torture, and the loss of years of one’s youth with one’s spirits intact. With deep insights into the meaning of suffering and the futility of hate and thoughts of revenge, the young author, just out of her teens, withstands all psychological and physical abuse and comes out, despite the loss of her faith in authority figures and her country, wise and mature. Her defiance served her well. Read with this in mind, the book is truly an inspiration."—Erika Loeffler Friedl, author of Women of Deh Koh: Lives in an Iranian Village

"A celebration of human courage under duress and a savage indictment of the oppressive regime of Iran. It shocks, angers, saddens, and inspires."—Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns

"My Life as a Traitor is an important and revealing book about a culture and a country that figures hugely in modern geopolitics. It is the inner journey of one young woman, of her fear, pride, courage, and ultimate survival in Tehran’s brutal Evin Prison. But it is also a coming-of-age story that haunts and provokes; beautifully written and disturbingly unforgettable. It will stand beside Solzhenitysn and Primo Levi as a book that shows exactly how human beings survive in the face of true evil."—Janine di Giovanni, author of Madness Visible: A Memoir of War

"A must read for anyone interested in understanding the complex nation that is Iran."—Firoozeh Dumas, author of Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America

"My Life as a Traitor is both shocking and inspiring: a graphic portrayal of the horrors that are unleashed when the idealism of youth challenges the dogmatism of zealots. Zarah Ghahramani has written a very human story of bravery and fear in the face of violence; her story is one of longing for beauty and freedom. Zarah's memoir of her time in Iran's infamous Evin prison is unforgettable in its portrayal of brutality, but it sings with a young woman's love of life and liberty."—Louise Brown, author of The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan’s Ancient Pleasure District

"Three years ago Zarah Ghahramani’s disquieting account of being held and interrogated for twenty-nine days in Iran’s infamous Evin Prison made its way into the Australian news media after writer Robert Hillman serendipitously met her while visiting Tehran. Next month her memoir —co-authored with Hillman—will be released in the United States. My Life as a Traitor is a story of humility obtained in a merciless situation and a young woman’s refusal to relinquish hope . . . My Life as a Traitor is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking. The book's chapters alternate between Zarah’s life before entering Evin, and what happens to her once she is inside. The reader is provided with glimpses of how this young woman’s fire for liberation was sparked and fostered inside a system of relentless oppression ('It is not so difficult for a child to learn the language and customs and protocols of two worlds . . . But with the passage of years, the time comes when the child, now a young woman, will wish to speak up more on behalf of one world than on behalf of the other. And that is what happened to me.'), and an understanding of how quickly the human spirit can be broken by intense cruelty and abuse ('Dear God, I’d always believed that I’d be so much stronger, that I’d resist and resist until death if need be. But it’s not true . . . I am not the person I hoped I would be.'). There is much wisdom in these pages and a reminder that we can either choose to be humble or life will inevitably choose humility for us."—Mandy Van Deven, Feminist Review

"Zarah Ghahramani was a 20-year-old university student from a cultured Persian family when she was locked in Iran's notorious Evin prison for political activity she says amounted to letting her hair show from beneath her head scarf. She recounts her beatings with dignified anger in this vivid, sometimes horrifying memoir, My Life as a Traitor mixing scenes from prison with sensual memories of her life before what her father called the regime of the 'primitives.' (She now lives in Australia.) Her strength: She doesn't let outrage overtake the striking feminine vitality of her storytelling. (A-)"—Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

"The second-year Iranian college student in 2001 knew that making that speech meant trouble, but she had no real expectation of being kidnapped in the heart of Tehran and hustled off to the notorious Evin Prison. Eventually, the 20-year-old Ghahramani is sentenced to 30 days and a few days—and several beatings—later is dumped in a vacant countryside to make her way home. Scenes from a happy family life (crippled by the Iran-Iraq war) and a spirited adolescence (cut short by a repressive regime) alternate with the prison experiences in this multilayered account. Ghahramani, daughter of a Muslim father and Zoroastrian mother, both Kurdish, dips with brevity and grace into personal family history and public political history. Graphic and powerful as her treatment of torturous imprisonment is, Ghahramani retains an irrepressible lightness, perhaps born of knowing that [a] sense of justice can always benefit from a complementary sense of the ridiculous. Her painfully acquired knowledge of how easy it is to reduce a human being to the level of animal does not keep her from wondering if I'll ever be pretty again. Nothing, however, dilutes the bare bones prison experience. Her straightforward style, elegant in its simplicity, has resonance and appeal beyond a mere record."—Publishers Weekly