Life As a Visitor

As an 11-year-old Iranian Jew, Angella Nazarian was forced by increasing violence from her childhood cocoon in Tehran. Part memoir, part travel diary, Life as a Visitor presents two interwoven narratives—of her family’s harrowing escape from revolution-rocked Iran to the glitz and glamour of Beverly Hills, and of Nazarian’s own quest to understand her past and her present. The author’s spectacular journeys through foreign lands, from wildebeest safaris to the gates of Petra, take in brutal poverty in Cambodia, exquisite beauty in Marbella, Spain, and one lonely tortoise in the Galapagos Islands. Featuring an evocative selection of images, this multifaceted, impressionistic mix of prose and poetry is rich in observation and sensuous detail, exploring the peculiar collapses of time and space made by memory.