I’m Writing You From Tehran: A Granddaughter’s Search for Her Family's Past and Their Country’s Future

In the wake of losing her beloved grandfather, Delphine Minoui decided to visit Iran for the first time since the revolution. It was 1998. She was twenty-two & a freshly minted journalist. She would stay for ten years.

Quickly absorbed into the everyday life of the city, Minoui attends secret dance parties that are raided by the morality police & dines in the home of a young couple active in the Basij—the fearsome militia. She befriends veteran journalists battling government censorship, imprisoned student poets, & her own grandmother (a woman who is discovering the world of international affairs through her contraband satellite TV).

And so it is all the more crushing when the political situation falters. Minoui joins street protests teeming with students hungry for change & is interrogated by the secret police; she sees a mirrored rise in the love of country—the yearning patriotism of the left, the militant nationalism of the right. Friends disappear; others may be tracking her movements. She finds love, loses her press credentials, marries, & is separated from her husband by erupting global conflict. Through it all, her love for Iran & its people deepens. In her family’s past she discovers a mission that will shape her entire future.

Framed as a letter to her grandfather & filled with disarming characters in momentous times, I’m Writing You from Tehran is a remarkable blend of global history, family memoir, & the making of a reporter, told by someone both insider & outsider—a child of the diaspora who is a world-class political journalist.

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Delphine Minoui, a recipient of the Albert-Londres Prize for her reporting on Iraq & Iran, is a journalist and Middle East correspondent for Le Figaro. She is the author of several books in French.