Roxana Shirazi pages Buy this book. Born in Iran on the cusp of the revolution, Roxana Shirazi fled the country 10 years later for England, where she suffered as a shy, dislocated teen whose only loves were library books and rock and roll. This split passion continued into adulthood: even as she pursued a life in academia, she spent wild nights backstage with London bands.
Now she reveals, in explicit and raunchy detail, her decadent romps with washed-up rockers, and she inexplicably lashes the sordid tale to the country of her birth.
This is the groupie tell-all gone disastrously wrong. Igniter Books , an imprint of HarperCollins, is marketing the memoir as "the rock and roll version of The Satanic Verses," and the New York Daily News quotes Shirazi as saying that several editors "passed on her manuscript for fear of a fatwa. In addition to the expected drugs-and-sex debauchery, Last Living Slut makes a mockery of Shirazi's natal religion. Take, for instance, the photo spread of Shirazi swathed in a chador, making an obscene gesture with her tongue between two fingers, or pulling open her traditional robe to reveal tawdry lingerie.
At a moment when the Western and Muslim countries are locked in mutual crosscultural suspicion, books like this one have the potential to spark absurd and unnecessary conflict.
This isn't to deny Shirazi her freedom of expression. It's only to wish that that expression had been more thoughtful and less exploitative. The book is getting scant coverage by the mainstream media.
