In Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning, Gohar Homayounpour plays a theme and variations on loss, love, and family against the backdrop of Iran’s chaotic recent past.

Homayounpour is simultaneously Shahrzad, the fearless storyteller, and Shahrzad’s analyst: subjecting fairy tales to fierce new insights, while weaving an indigo thread through her own devastation on the death of her father and the wonders and horrors of motherhood. A blue thread, or melody, runs though the separations and emigrations of her family and patients driven or broken apart by war, and likewise through the fraught world inhabited by Persian women. This book breaks new psychoanalytic ground, offering a radical rejection of traditional clichés about Iran, and Iranian women, but its unsparing elegance transcends any political agenda, bridging the ocean of a shared and tragic humanity.

Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed readers, as well as those interested in grief, Iran, and women’s experiences.