Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America

“Remarkable…told with wry humor shorn of sentimentality… In the end, what sticks with the reader is an exuberant immigrant embrace of America.” —San Francisco Chronicle

In 1972, when she was seven, the author and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond Firoozeh’s father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here. In a series of deftly drawn scenes, Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (or cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an array of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot. An unforgettable story of identity, discovery, and the power of family love, Funny in Farsi will leave us all laughing—without an accent.

“What’s charming beyond the humor of this memoir is that it remains affectionate even in the weakest, most tenuous moments for the culture. It’s the brilliance of true sophistication at work.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Often hilarious, always interesting… Like the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, this book describes with humor the intersection and overlapping of two cultures.” —The Providence Journal