Persepolis: Marjane Satrapi's Graphic Memoir of Iran

Persepolis is a graphic memoir by Marjane Satrapi about growing up in Iran during and after the 1979 revolution, leaving for Austria as a teenager, and coming home again. It is told in plain black-and-white drawings, and it has sold more than two million copies worldwide.

It is one of the few comics that people who never read comics have read. This guide covers what happens in it, how its simple style does so much work, why it keeps being challenged in schools, and where to start if you have only seen the film.

What Persepolis is

Satrapi wrote and drew the book in French. The comics publisher L'Association brought it out in four volumes between 2000 and 2003. In English it appeared in two volumes, The Story of a Childhood in 2003 and The Story of a Return in 2004, and a single-volume edition followed in 2007, the year of the film.

The title is the name of the ancient capital of the Persian Empire. Satrapi chose it, she said, to remind readers that Iran has thousands of years of history behind it, not only the recent decades of revolution and war that most Western readers knew from the news.

The story of a childhood

The first part opens in 1980 with Marji, aged ten, the only child of a politically active, upper-middle-class family in Tehran. She reads about revolutionaries and philosophers, joins her parents' hopes as the Shah falls, and then watches as the new Islamic government makes the veil compulsory and closes down the freedoms her family took for granted.

The people around her fill the book: a grandmother who tells her about the past, and her uncle Anoosh, a former political prisoner who is arrested again and executed. Then Iraq invades, Tehran is bombed, and a missile destroys the building next door. Her parents decide she will be safer abroad, and the first part ends with her leaving for Vienna.

The story of a return

The second part follows Marji through four years in Austria: a Catholic boarding house, friends who talk about things no one could say in Tehran, drugs, a bad relationship and, finally, two months living on the streets before she falls seriously ill. She goes home.

Back in Iran she studies art, where drawing a nude model has to be done in secret, marries young and divorces. In 1994 she leaves for France for good. The book's last words are "Freedom had a price."

How the drawings work

Satrapi draws in heavy black and white, with almost no shading and very simple faces. That can look naive at first, but it is doing a lot. A crowd of veiled schoolgirls becomes a row of nearly identical shapes, which makes the point about uniformity without a word of explanation.

The simplicity also lets the book show violence without becoming unbearable, and leaves gaps that the reader fills in, much like the gaps in a childhood memory. Critics have called it a kind of visual autofiction for this reason. If you are new to reading panels, our guide on how to read a comic explains what to look for in a page like hers.

Persepolis and Maus

Persepolis is often read alongside Art Spiegelman's Maus, the Holocaust memoir that drew Jews as mice and Nazis as cats and showed that comics could carry the weight of history. Both books are personal stories told against a historical catastrophe, and both use a deliberately simple style to do it.

Our piece on Maus and the rise of the graphic novel tells that part of the story. Whether you call either book a comic or a graphic novel is mostly a question of format, as we explain in graphic novel vs comic book.

The film

Satrapi co-directed an animated film of the book with Vincent Paronnaud, keeping the black-and-white look. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 and won the Jury Prize, despite complaints from the Iranian government, and it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Satrapi became the first woman nominated in that category.

The film is a good introduction, but it compresses a great deal. The book has more of the family's history and more of the small daily details that make Marji's world feel real.

Why schools argue about it

Persepolis is widely taught, because it gives students a view of Iran from the inside and is quick to read. It is also often challenged. In 2013 Chicago Public Schools ordered copies removed from seventh-grade classrooms over its graphic language and images. Students protested, and the district returned the book to libraries and classrooms.

In 2014 it was second on the American Library Association's list of the most challenged books in the United States, after challenges in Oregon, Illinois and Texas. In each of those cases the school board kept it.

Satrapi's later life

Satrapi lived in Paris and went on to make other books and films, including Chicken with Plums. She was an outspoken supporter of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests that began in Iran in 2022, and in 2025 she turned down France's Legion of Honour, citing France's treatment of ordinary Iranians.

She died in Paris in June 2026, aged 56, a little over a year after the death of her husband, Mattias Ripa. The French presidency called her a freedom-loving artist whose work carried a universal message. Persepolis is the place to start with her work, and it still reads as freshly as it did in 2000.