As usual, I got the news while doomscrolling at 4 AM. I made a small involuntary sound, put my phone down, and stared at the ceiling.

For a moment, it’s 2007 again.  I’m sitting in a movie theater next to my mother. We’re watching the animated film adaptation of Persepolis at an ancient but charming cinema. It smells like ghosts and popcorn. Sitting next to her and watching Marjane Satrapi’s life in black and white is one of my happiest memories. My wet eyes burn.

Marjane Satrapi was born on November 22, 1969, in Rasht, Iran. She grew up in Tehran and died in Paris.

Her parents were activists who raised her to think critically about power, religion, and history. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the country she had known was replaced by a dictatorship. The changes were not abstract. They arrived in the form of dress codes, censored books, restrictions on music, and new rules about who could say what and to whom. She was ten years old.

By fourteen, her parents sent her to Vienna, fearing that her outspokenness would get her killed. That decision cost everyone involved something enormous. She arrived in Europe without the language, without her family, and without any clear sense of what her life would become. She moved through boarding houses and difficult living situations. She experienced homelessness. A scene from Persepolis implies potential sexual assault during this time in her life.

She returned to Iran after four years, suffered depression, got divorced, and eventually left again, this time for France. She settled in Paris and studied illustration at the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg.

Persepolis emerged from all of that accumulated experience. Published in France beginning in 2000, the graphic memoir was drawn in stark black and white. That visual choice carried political as well as aesthetic weight. The format stripped away the distance that narrative prose can create. Each stage of her life is fully fleshed out in relatable reality. A child watching her country change. A teenager navigating Europe alone. A young woman returning to a home that was unrecognizable.

The four volumes were collected into a single English edition that reached readers across the world. When the animated film arrived in 2007, it was received with the kind of attention that changes a life. Satrapi codirected it with Vincent Paronnaud, and the film won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year. It was then nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

That an independent animated film drawn in black and white, rooted in Iranian political history and the story of one woman’s exile, could compete at that level said something about the force of the work. Ratatouille ultimately won the award, but the nomination placed her story inside a mainstream conversation it might otherwise never have entered. For many viewers, it was the first time they encountered that history in a form that was neither documentary nor caricature.

She continued making films after Persepolis. Chicken with Plums was released in 2011, another adaptation of her own graphic work. The Voices came in 2014, starring Ryan Reynolds as a mentally ill serial killer. Radioactive followed in 2019, a biographical film starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie.

Then there’s her friendship with Art Spiegelman.

Spiegelman spent years developing Maus, a graphic memoir about how his father survived the Holocaust. Like Persepolis, Maus used the drawn image to carry a historical weight that straightforward realism might have made unbearable. Both works used autobiography as history without collapsing one into the other. Both arrived in a form some dismissed and others recognized as essential.

Spiegelman understood what Persepolis was doing before much of the literary world caught up. He recognized in it a formal kinship with his own project, a shared conviction that the comics form could hold catastrophe without flinching, and the friendship between them was grounded in that mutual understanding.

He spoke publicly about her work and treated her as a peer. That support mattered practically, in terms of how Persepolis was received beyond France. It also mattered symbolically. Spiegelman carried enormous authority in the world of literary comics, and his recognition of her work helped frame Persepolis as serious literature for audiences who might otherwise have dismissed an illustrated memoir.

Their work has faced similar institutional resistance. Maus was removed from school curricula in parts of the United States. Persepolis was challenged in school districts across the country, with objections centered on its depictions of violence, religion, and the body. Both responses told a consistent story: that the books had landed somewhere real, that they made visible something some readers preferred to keep invisible.

Satrapi herself was direct about such challenges. She did not soften her positions or adjust her language to accommodate discomfort. That quality ran through her public life as consistently as it ran through her work. It reached readers worldwide and was widely discussed for its clarity and moral focus. She used simple images and plain language to show how politics enters kitchens, classrooms, and bedrooms.

Marjane died today at fifty six. Her family said she died of sadness. That is not a clinical diagnosis. It is a way to express the cumulative effect of grief, loneliness, and stress. Her husband, Mattias Ripa, died of cancer the previous year. That loss, combined with ongoing public crises, can break even the strongest spirit.

From 2024 through 2026, conditions inside Iran grew steadily worse. Multiple outlets documented continued repression: arrests and prosecutions of protesters, journalists, academics, and activists, alongside targeted violence against cultural and intellectual figures.

Regional tensions escalated alongside these internal crackdowns, approaching open conflict in some accounts by 2026. Observers noted expanded restrictions on civil society, tighter controls on cultural expression, and increased pressure on diaspora communities.

The pattern repeated in cycles: political shock, protest, arrests, then waves of reaction inside Iran and among diaspora communities abroad. International responses mixed sanctions, diplomatic statements, and limited interventions that changed little on the ground. Civilian suffering persists while global attention moves on, leaving local communities to absorb the impact long after the news cycle ended.

The last two years have been brutal for writers, scientists, and artists based in Iran. The steady stream of images from protests, executions, arrests, and sexual assaults has become a daily dirge. For someone like Satrapi, whose work was committed to calling out repression, the weight of personal loss layered over relentless public atrocity was something difficult to measure from the outside. Her obituaries reflect that connection directly.

Coverage of her death combines factual reporting about dates, awards, and adaptations with the family’s plain language of private grief. Both are necessary. The public record preserves achievements and influence. The family statement conveys what the official record cannot. Together, they tell a fuller story than either could alone.

I grew up Persian in Texas. I have never met any of my relatives in Iran. My grandparents are dead, as well as most of my father’s brothers.

The only family I ever met on my father’s side were two aunts I rarely saw. They owned a beauty salon in Dallas. Once, during a family reunion, one of my aunts told my father in Farsi that she wanted to fix my eyebrows. Her smile was concerned.

She meant well, but she also knew that I knew only two words of Farsi – one for water, the other for an elephant’s penis. Despite this, my heritage makes up half of my heart. Not speaking the language has never erased that lifelong connection.

I am constantly mistaken for other nationalities, often Italian, sometimes Spanish. These misidentifications are usually flattering in their way, but deep down, I still want to be seen for what I actually am. Strangers address me differently because of it, and I am perceived differently in public, even though none of that changes who I am.

My parents’ marriage was difficult during my childhood. My mother is American, of German, English, and Scottish descent. Like Marjane Satrapi, my father was born in Rasht and raised in Tehran. Whenever they argued, my mother would take me to the local dollar cinema. She and I would sit through a movie together: Jurassic Park, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Lassie, Black Beauty. Then we would go home.

That pattern repeated over the years. The memory of seeing Persepolis with my mother in college was different though. It was not about escaping turmoil. It was a beautiful warm day, and a visit to a cute theater with delicious air conditioning sounded great.

A week after 9/11, my middle school Italian teacher took me and two other Iranian American girls aside after class. As an Iranian immigrant herself, she was worried about our safety. She must have seen something in my face, because she reassured me that I would be fine since I did not look Iranian. I did not inherit my father’s math skills, his Farsi, or his complexion. Only his humor, anger, and eyes.

I was thirteen then. I am thirty eight now. The detail of that classroom exchange stays with me: the small bowl of chocolates on the teacher’s desk, her precise eyeliner, the shine of the other girls’ jet black hair next to my frizzy reddish brown.

I had a unibrow in elementary and middle school. You can imagine how that went. Over the years I have repeatedly butchered my eyebrows, despite a thick connected brow being a sign of beauty in Iran. The battle of these conflicting beauty standards left behind tortured brows and constant humiliation in its bloody wake.

Worst of all, my father did not like dogs. Dogs were dirty, and in his words, ‘angels will not fly into any home with a dog in it’. He hated how I fussed over every stray on our street. The second my hand touched their fur, I always heard a disgusted growl from his general direction. Whenever I was not begging for a dog, I was crying about it in my bedroom.

My father’s maternal family were originally Zoroastrian, a faith that predates the Abrahamic religions and reveres dogs as sacred. My pretty Zoroastrian grandmother met my Muslim grandfather on a train station platform. They eloped on a motorcycle later that day and had eight children. Only one was a girl.

I’ve been told that the little girl had blonde hair, blue eyes, and an angelic aura. After her death at the age of seven, my grandparents never spoke of her again to anyone, including their seven sons. She had been their second child. My father was their third.

My grandmother owned a Maltese during my father’s childhood. It sometimes slept in the same bed as my father and his brothers. When my father told me this warmly during a drive to the grocery store, my shock was quickly overtaken by irritation that I only found out about this at thirty six years old. What the hell, I thought, that changes everything.

My grandmother would have grown up understanding dogs as sacred, as protectors, as creatures that carry a kind of spiritual weight. Then she eloped, had eight children, and lost one of them. A blonde, blue eyed little girl with an angelic quality, gone at seven. After that, no one spoke of her again. Not to friends, not to neighbors, not even to the little boys who grew up in the shadow of that hushed absence.

I wonder if the Maltese was how my grandmother held that grief. Not a replacement, but a small warm body to absorb something she could not say aloud. A creature that did not require explanation or language. My father, growing up in that house, would have understood without being told that the dog was connected to something heavy. Children absorb the emotional atmospheres of their homes without ever being handed a key.

It finally made sense. It hadn’t been religion or hygiene – instead, it was something older, less nameable. A feeling learned in childhood that he carried into adulthood, into my childhood home, into the disgusted sound he made anytime I touched a dog.

He has never said any of this, of course, and this is all purely speculation. He probably never thought it in those terms. Still, as I write this, I think about my grandmother and her Maltese, and about my father telling me that story warmly, fondly, as if a dog sleeping in your bed was the most natural thing in the world.

Despite everything, my relationship with my father is full of love. I love his intelligence, his passion for music and art, his humor, how he was the life of any party. He worked hard under brutal conditions, often twelve hour days in a warehouse during the worst Houston summers, fixing machines that could easily take a finger or a life. His gritty work ethic is the foundation of every success I have had so far.

The family that lived across the street from us had a Dachshund mix named Taz. Taz loved me. So much so, he would escape his backyard and make his way into ours on an every day basis. Seeing him pant happily at our back door was the best part of my day. That dog loved me so much that it inspired my father to walk across the street with an offer to buy Taz.

I remember being surprised when he did it, especially since I had stopped begging for a dog around that time. The daily backyard break-ins were enough for me. Taz spent so much time with me compared to his owners, I thought that they would be happy to have us take him off their hands. I was equally surprised when they refused.

Shortly afterwards, Taz disappeared. I never saw him again. I also stopped playing with the children across the street. Even before his disappearance, they were sick of how their dog always ran up to me when we got off the school bus. Never them.

My feelings for my father have never been simple, and I have stopped expecting them to be. Learning the story of my grandmother’s Maltese did not absolve anything, but it made the hurt legible. I do not hold anything against him. What I carry forward is the image of him walking across the street to try to buy me a dog, quietly, genuinely wanting to do right by his daughter.

Marjane Satrapi’s work made room for that kind of combination. She documented cruelty and compassion without flattening one into the other. That approach stays with me as I think about identity and grief. Despite the personal pain that has come with it, I embrace my heritage and all of the history it carries. I will keep the recipes, art, humor, music, and values alive. I will not let any single grievance become the whole story. I will finish my Farsi courses on Rosetta Stone by the end of this year.