Dead Iranian Girl by Roxana Shirazi

From the author of The Last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage comes a raw, urgent, and unflinching odyssey of exile, identity, and defiance. Dead Iranian Girl charts Roxana Shirazi’s real-life attempt to smuggle herself across the Iranian border in a desperate bid to revisit her childhood home and reclaim the culture that shaped her.

Despite the critical acclaim and international success of her first memoir, Shirazi was devastated—if not entirely shocked—to learn she was no longer welcome in the country of her birth. Her graphic, impassioned writing about female sexuality had been branded an unforgivable crime by the Islamic Republic. Yet what concerned her most was backlash from the West, where media and institutions dismissed her as the “wrong kind” of immigrant and silenced her voice. Along the way, she also recounts her immersion in underworld circles, including a fraught relationship with a Los Angeles mafia boss, underscoring the extremes she navigated in search of belonging, survival, and truth.

About Roxana Shirazi

Roxana Shirazi is an Iranian-born author, journalist, actress, and feminist provocateur whose debut memoir, The Last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage (HarperCollins), earned prize-winning international attention for its fearless candor. Known for fusing personal risk with gonzo reporting, she has written on politics, sexuality, and identity across both Western and Middle Eastern contexts.

Raised in Tehran during the Revolution and war, she was sent alone to England at the age of ten, where she endured racism, abuse, and dislocation before carving out a voice that defies cultural taboos. Her investigations and lived experiences have taken her from underground music scenes to mob circles, from clandestine border crossings to encounters with white supremacists.

Praised as raw, shocking, and intellectually sharp, Shirazi has been compared to Anthony Bourdain for her immersive, unvarnished style. Beyond writing, she is passionate about animal welfare, the subcultures of Victorian East London, and the cultural icons who shaped her sensibility—from the Rat Pack to Jim Morrison to Christine Keeler.

Moving between past and present, Shirazi confronts the tumultuous fallout of her debut—her professional erasure, an affair with a legendary rock star, even an undercover journey into an Alabama Ku Klux Klan compound—while retracing her childhood in Tehran: a city alive with pre- and post-Revolution upheaval, political resistance, addiction, abuse, and her mother’s fierce but fragile resilience.

Bold, lyrical, and uncompromising, Dead Iranian Girl is a reckoning with belonging—what it means to be from somewhere, what it costs to be cast out, and the relentless, aching pull of home.