Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
by Marjane Satrapi
The cost of leaving — and the cost of going back.
For you if
you know what it costs to leave home, and you're still paying it
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
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Marjane Satrapi left Tehran at 14 to escape the Islamic Revolution. Persepolis 2 picks up where she lands: Vienna, 1984, a teenage Iranian exile in art school who has no idea how to be from somewhere that no longer exists as she knew it. Four years of radical dislocation follow — relationships, homelessness, depression, a near-fatal breakdown — and then the decision to go back. She returns to Iran at 18 and finds it remade into something she can't inhabit either. This is the book about what happens after you survive: the exile's second wound, which is the discovery that there's no home to return to.
Banned & challenged
Find out what they were so afraid of.
Get a copy and decide for yourself.
Chicago Public Schools pulled Persepolis from middle and high school reading lists in 2013, officially citing "graphic language and images not appropriate for general use." What the book actually does is center an Iranian teenage girl's full interiority — her anger, her depression, her politics, her sexuality, her refusal to be reducible to either a Western fantasy of the oppressed Muslim woman or the Islamic Republic's ideal of feminine submission. The banning is a way of maintaining that invisibility. The stated reason protects no child; it protects the adults who are uncomfortable with the children those kids are actually becoming.
See every banned & challenged book on our shelves →Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Iran • Europe
- Voice
- Written by an Iranian author
The original Persepolis is already on the shelf. This volume goes somewhere the first one doesn't: inward. Less about the revolution, more about what you do with yourself after you've escaped one. If you have a teenager figuring out who they are under pressure, this is the book.
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Persepolis(2007)
dir. Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud
Same event: Iranian Revolution · Same country: Iran · Same themes: Coming of Age, Women Under Authoritarianism
Her own memoir, animated — testimony, not reportage.
Animated adaptation of Satrapi's own graphic memoir — a girl coming of age in Tehran during and after the 1979 revolution, then in exile, then back home as an adult reckoning with who she's become.
Why it’s here: Satrapi adapted her own story, so nothing here is secondhand. Punk in the plainest sense: the Iranian government denounced it, and she made it anyway. Pedagogical in that it teaches a kid what authoritarianism actually feels like to live through — not the textbook timeline, the daily compromises.
Where to watch: Rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon Video, or Fandango at Home — no subscription option currently.Letterboxd ↗
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe(2023)
dir. Aitch Alberto
Same themes: Coming of Age, Identity and Belonging
One summer, secrets neither boy knew he had.
In 1987 El Paso, two Mexican-American teenage loners strike up a friendship that cracks open everything one of them has spent years keeping carefully closed off — including who he is. Adapted from Benjamin Alire Sáenz's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in its tenderness rather than its edge — a bilingual, bicultural, queer coming-of-age story that doesn't need trauma to justify its own gentleness. Pedagogical in showing how friendship can crack open a kid who's spent years protecting himself by staying closed.
Where to watch: Streaming on Disney+, HuluLetterboxd ↗
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
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Firoozeh Dumas
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The satire that got its author a fatwa.
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Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi
Rebellion drawn in black ink.
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Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
How to Be Black
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The kids school labels remedial are not dumb.
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Flip the lens
Same country. Now hear it from the other side.
For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
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A bored boy drives through a tollbooth. The other side is worth it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the First)
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Every adult fails them. Count Olaf nearly wins. Thirteen times.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
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One night. New York. Two people who speak in music.
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Flamer
Mike Curato
A gay Latino teen at camp. Banned for existing.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST