Growing Up and Growing Old Theme Analysis

Persepolis 2 picks up where Persepolis left off: 14-year-old Marjane’s parents have decided that their outspoken daughter isn’t safe in their home country of Iran. Because of this, they send her to a French school in Vienna, Austria. During Marjane’s four years in Europe, she comes of age in important ways—for instance, she undergoes puberty and experiments with drugs and sex. However, Marjane must also confront the fact that while she’s busy with her own life in Vienna for four years, she ignores the political turmoil happening in Iran. And all the while, her parents and beloved grandmother are also getting old. By showing these twin processes of coming of age and growing old, Persepolis 2 makes the case that maturation—no matter one’s age—entails realizing that all people are aging, all the time. And within families, this means that grandparents, parents, and children must reevaluate how they interact with one another to accommodate their advancing ages and changing relationships.

In many cases, the realization that everyone is getting older is difficult to come to terms with. It’s especially difficult for Marjane and her parents, as Marjane spends four years (from age 14 through 18) away from her family while she studies in Vienna. Her mother only visits once during these four years, and she Marjane are both shocked to see the dramatic changes that have taken place in the interim. In the year and a half between when Marjane leaves for Vienna and when her mother comes to visit, Marjane rapidly undergoes puberty—she grows seven inches in a year. When her mother arrives at the airport, her beloved daughter looks unrecognizably mature. But Marjane also experiences a shock of her own: since she’s been gone, her mother’s hair has turned gray. These swift changes provide the physical proof that Marjane is no longer a child and that her parents are no longer young—and their relationships with each other must evolve to reflect the physical changes that have taken place.

As Marjane and her family members mature, they must face the ensuing personal and interpersonal changes head-on. Marjane, for instance, must adjust to the fact that her mother is well aware of the fact that Marjane smokes cigarettes—something that Marjane initially tries to hide to avoid being scolded. To Marjane’s shock, her mother turns out to be more than willing to share cigarettes and smoke in front of Marjane, something she never did when Marjane was a child. In this sense, the shared cigarettes reflect the fact that everyone in the family is, by this point in time, an adult—and everyone must respect their other family members’ autonomy. But while the cigarettes offer Marjane and her parents something over which to connect, after Marjane returns to Tehran at age 18, she turns down her parents’ invitations to family vacations and social functions. She avoids these outings in part because they throw her newfound adulthood and independence into sharp relief. In other words, they make obvious how every member has or hasn’t changed—which means that Marjane has to face up to how much she’s changed in comparison. This is uncomfortable for her, especially since she feels guilty about experimenting with sex and drugs in Vienna. Marjane doesn’t necessarily like herself, and so these comparisons become even more uncomfortable for her.

Marjane and her family members’ transformations become especially clear a few years later, when Marjane gets engaged to Reza, a fellow student at the Islamic Azad University in Tehran. The events surrounding the marriage make it clear that while everyone is moving into new phases of life, these changes aren’t as linear as one might expect. In describing her engagement and marriage, Marjane makes it clear to readers that the marriage was a bad idea from the start. In retrospect, her choice to get married reads as a childish mistake, not as a mature adult choice. Further, Marjane shares that her father knew her marriage with Reza would end in divorce, but he still felt it was important to allow young Marjane to make her own choices and learn this for herself. The act of getting married represents a kind of regression for Marjane but a leap forward for her parents, as this is seemingly the first time they allow Marjane to make a mistake of this magnitude. Then, when Marjane decides to get divorced less than three years later, it’s an opportunity for her to bring herself onto equal footing with her parents and her grandmother. Everyone recognizes that Marjane made a mistake, but her parents and grandmother choose not to make a fuss over it or shame Marjane. Instead, they support Marjane in her divorce and subsequent move to Europe. This gives everyone in the family the opportunity to celebrate their increasingly mature and open relationships with one another.

Marjane’s marriage creates a high point of sorts in her relationships with her parents and her grandparents, but the memoir ends with news of her grandmother’s death two years after Marjane leaves Tehran. The book thus closes on the idea that while relationships between aging grandparents, parents, and adult children can improve and become increasingly fulfilling as everyone gets older, the relationships all inevitably end as family members age and die. As fulfilling as these relationships may be for everyone involved, they nevertheless come to an end—another inevitable reality of aging that everyone must face.