Embroideries

by Marjane Satrapi

From the author of the critically acclaimed two-volume graphic memoir PERSEPOLIS, this is an illustrated collection of anecdotes about the intimate lives of Iranian women. As a 20-year-old Marjane and her female relatives and neighbors sit around the tea samovar, they discuss men, marriage, and sexual experiences. Included are tragicomic accounts of a 13-year-old fleeing her marriage to a 69-year-old, a woman's absurd attempts to use white magic to keep her boyfriend's love, and the reasons why it is better to be a mistress than a wife. The "embroideries" of the title refer to the highly colored tales being told, and more literally as a term for surgical procedures that sew up the cervix to "restore" a woman's virginity. The black-and-white, two-dimensional, cartoonlike art is in the same simply evocative style as PERSEPOLIS and PERSEPOLIS 2.

Editions of Embroideries

	ISBN 9780375714672	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Pantheon Books	Date 2006	Price $5.98	Very Good
	ISBN 9780375423055	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Pantheon Books	Date 2005	Price $2.36	Used - Good

Publisher Notes

From the best-selling author of Persepolis comes this gloriously entertaining and enlightening look into the sex lives of Iranian women. Embroideries gathers together Marjane’s tough-talking grandmother, stoic mother, glamorous and eccentric aunt and their friends and neighbors for an afternoon of tea drinking and talking. Naturally, the subject turns to love, sex and the vagaries of men.

As the afternoon progresses, these vibrant women share their secrets, their regrets and their often outrageous stories about, among other things, how to fake one’s virginity, how to escape an arranged marriage, how to enjoy the miracles of plastic surgery and how to delight in being a mistress. By turns revealing and hilarious, these are stories about the lengths to which some women will go to find a man, keep a man or, most importantly, keep up appearances.

Full of surprises, this introduction to the private lives of some fascinating women, whose life stories and lovers and will strike us as at once deeply familiar and profoundly different from our own, is sure to bring smiles of recognition to the faces of women everywhere–and to teach us all a thing or two.