Content warning: This section of the guide discusses drug addiction, suicide, and war.

“What a traitor! While people were dying in our country, she was talking to me about trivial things.”

This thought, which reveals one of Marjane’s internal conflicts, goes through Marjane’s mind upon reuniting with an Iranian friend in exile in Austria. While abroad, she struggles with whether to sever herself from problems in Iran or respect them by considering problems in Austria as trivial. The exclamatory accusation of “traitor” mimics the fundamentalism from which she is attempting to escape.

“As for Houshang, Zozo’s husband, he was a CEO in Iran, but in Austria, he was nothing.”

After arriving in Austria, Marjane finds her mother’s friend Zozo in constant battle with her deflated spouse. Marjane rationalizes the anger and resentment by summing up the experience that many Iranians faced when they fled Iran for exile in Europe. This conveys a loss of identity in exile and the inability to reclaim one’s status abroad.

“I understood later that her reserve came from the fact that she considered the others to be spoiled children. But I was different. I had known war.”

Lonely in her new boarding school, Marjane is finally befriended by Julie. She attributes this friendship to Julie’s respect for her maturity, which she in turn contributes to living in a war zone. Marjane is a round character: She believes that the war in Iran (and the shift to fundamentalism) has stunted her development. At the same time, she reveals her belief that war ages and matures those who experience it, and she capitalizes on this to make friends with the older counterculture kids at school.