Embroideries gathers together many of the women in Marjane
Satrapi's life - her beloved grandmother, her mother, an
eccentric aunt, their friends and neighbours - for an afternoon of
tea-drinking and talking. And as is only to be expected when a
group of women reunite around cups of tea, the subjects turn to
love, sex and the vagaries of men - in this case, Iranian men. As
the afternoon progresses, these colourful women share their secrets
about, among other things: how to fake your virginity, how to
escape the husband your family has chosen for you, how to enjoy the
miracles of plastic surgery and how to take advantage of being
someone's mistress. By turns revealing and hilarious, these are
stories about the lengths to which some women will go to find a
man, to keep a man, or just to keep up appearances. We also witness
tearful confessions and heavy-hearted tales of regret and betrayal,
of unhappy marriages and of young women forced or choosing to marry
for all the wrong reasons. And though love is mostly to blame,
there's no missing the message that much of their suffering is
due to a culture that prizes men above women and makes a
woman's worth dependent on her virginity. Full of surprises,
this introduction to the private lives of some very interesting
ordinary women also demonstrates brilliantly how much women the
world over have in common.
"This is a book to provoke and entertain" -- Peter Millar The Times 20050507 "Satrapi's drawings are sparing and highly stylised; she is able to render nuances of expression with simple, bold strokes... The stories are wittily told and show a side of life in Iran that is unknown to outsiders" -- Lydia Adetunji Financial Times 20050514 "A daring and brilliantly calculated illumination of a secret space... Though Embroideries is not a continuation of the Persepolis story, it sits at the heart of the same world - a brutally policed society where an extraordinarily rich and inventive culture still prevails, if only behind closed doors, where women are wildly subversive, funny, free-thinking and sexy" -- Maureen Freely Guardian "This is Sex and the City, Middle-Eastern style - outrageous, explicit and funny" -- Kelly Knox Time Out
