When Skateboards Will Be Free
A Memoir of a Political Childhood
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
BONUS: This edition contains a When Skateboards Will Be Free discussion guide.
“The revolution is not only inevitable, it is imminent. It is not only imminent, it is quite imminent. And when the time comes, my father will lead it.”
With a profound gift for capturing the absurd in life, and a deadpan wisdom that comes from surviving a surreal childhood in the Socialist Workers Party, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh has crafted an unsentimental, funny, heartbreaking memoir.
Saïd’s Iranian-born father and American Jewish mother had one thing in common: their unshakable conviction that the workers’ revolution was coming. Separated since their son was nine months old, they each pursued a dream of the perfect socialist society. Pinballing with his mother between makeshift Pittsburgh apartments, falling asleep at party meetings, longing for the luxuries he’s taught to despise, Said waits for the revolution that never, ever arrives. “Soon,” his mother assures him, while his long-absent father quixotically runs as a socialist candidate for president in an Iran about to fall under the ayatollahs. Then comes the hostage crisis. The uproar that follows is the first time Saïd hears the word “Iran” in school. There he is suddenly forced to confront the combustible stew of his identity: as an American, an Iranian, a Jew, a socialist... and a middle-school kid who loves football and video games.
Poised perfectly between tragedy and farce, here is a story by a brilliant young writer struggling to break away from the powerful mythologies of his upbringing and create a life—and a voice—of his own. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’ s memoir is unforgettable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this subtle yet bracing account of growing up in Pittsburgh as the child of two committed socialists during the 1970s and '80s, Sayrafiezadeh offers up a solidly written memoir expanding on a piece he wrote for Granta in 2005. The youngest son of an Iranian-born father and an American-Jewish mother, Sayrafiezadeh spent most of his life after age three as his mother's emotional crutch after his father leaves to pursue a single-minded devotion to a cause that makes him "disappear behind this massive workload of revolution" and out of his son's life. As Sayrafiezadeh moves from cheap to cheaper apartment with his fervently revolutionary mother, he comes to realize that his poverty "was intentional and self-inflicted... as opposed to a reality that could not be avoided" so much so that his mother won't get him a skateboard until "the revolution comes," when "everyone will have a skateboard, because all skateboards will be free." Sayrafiezadeh's excellent memoir displays a sophistication and keen intelligence that allows him to walk the line between pain and humor without even seeming mawkish or cheaply cynical.
