Don’t Call Me a Lady
On Marjane Satrapi’s craft, convictions and complexity
When I saw the article with a typo in her surname, saying she had “died of sadness,” I thought at first that it must be a hoax, some sick AI-made joke. But here it was, everywhere online: French-Iranian graphic novelist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi dies at 56, about a year after her husband’s passing.
Maryam, a childhood friend, messaged me: “It feels like losing someone close.” And it did.
I had only seen Marjane Satrapi once, and yet it felt like I had known her forever. There are some obvious parallels in our lives: we are roughly from the same generation. Like her, I lived in Iran as a small child, during the heyday of the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. We both weathered separation from our parents as young teens and came of age between Europe and Iran. There’s our French nationality and our Iranian heritage. I now know that we had mutual acquaintances, but I never personally met Marjane.
When I was in my early 20s and still lived in Paris, I once saw her at an event. Persepolis had been published in its original French version, and my friend François and I went to a small theatre where she was scheduled to speak. I don’t remember which theatre or what the event preceding the talk was about. The specifics of what Marjane said that evening, speaking on stage with a fellow artist, have also escaped me. What I do remember, however, is how charmed I was by her blunt demeanor. She spoke in colloquial French, was chatty and funny, and seemed unpretentious. Sitting a few rows away, I felt drawn to her.
This must have been in 2001 or early 2002. Her fame was nowhere near what it is today, but the first volumes of Persepolis — the story of an Iranian girl’s coming of age in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution — had been published in France and warmly received by critics. My few Iranian friends in Paris had read her books, but it also wasn’t unusual to see the book on some of my French friends’ bookshelves.
I remember a conversation with Maryam around that time where we talked about the graphic novel closely inspired by Marjane’s life. We talked about the creative liberties she seemed to have taken with the narrative. We recalled some of the book’s stories: the young man who fell to his death from a balcony fleeing the morality police during a raided party, a dramatic incident that both Maryam and I had heard about at family gatherings. Or the all-too-familiar anecdotes of pirated Michael Jackson tapes sold on Tehran’s black market. How strange to see stories we were meant to keep to ourselves rendered so starkly yet with humor on the page. How odd to see the struggles of Iranian families through those years of political violence, bombings, and economic hardship laid bare for the world.
Survival instinct means “whatever the situation, we continue to live. With bombs, we continue to live. With a dictatorship, we continue to live.” Marjane would tell Laure Adler on France Inter some two decades later. “It’s about knowing how to pretend to have a normal life when everything around you is abnormal. Even this, we manage.”
Marjane was open about her emotional baggage. She had written the story of that young child after a bout of depression that had lasted for months. “It had to come out,” was how she put it to France Culture in 2020. Drawing came to her naturally, and she stayed with that medium sensing that it might be the most relatable format. “I never thought it would be published, and when it was published, I never thought anyone would want to read it. I just needed to write it, so I did.”
I’m neither a historian nor a sociologist, Marjane Satrapi said at a 2005 PEN America event in conversation with Art Spiegelman, moderated by Françoise Mouly. “But I was born in a certain place, at a certain time. It happened that I saw a revolution, it happened that I saw a war.” Some people know little about Iran yet are “so confident in their perception” and she wanted to offer another point of view, she told Vogue a year later.
To many Iranians inside and outside Iran, Marjane had become a witness and a spokesperson.
Not long after that evening in Paris, I left for New York to begin graduate studies in international relations. Persepolis was published in the U.S. and translated in numerous languages around the world. The book became a staple in North American colleges and universities. My friend Amanda even taught it to her high-school students in an English class. “For many of my students it was the first or the only thing they would read about Iran.”
The screen adaptation of Persepolis brought the story of a young Iranian girl finding her way at home and abroad to legions of viewers worldwide. The film won the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards in 2008, making Marjane one of the first women ever nominated in that category. About a decade later, the book would be listed on the Guardian’s 100 best books of the 21st century.
Marjane sensed, perhaps instinctively, what would take me several years as a current affairs reporter to fully grasp. The human element in a story mattered most, and often it was the only way to reach readers. News washed over audiences, but the story of one person could stop them in their tracks. After more than a decade in the news industry, I began to suspect that well-drawn, fictional characters in novels could achieve more than any news segment mentioning real lives ever could. News caught individuals at a single point in their lives, usually at their lowest. It did not tell us who they were before or what they might become after. Their inner lives were invisible, their voices, especially when speaking a foreign language, felt inaccessible. They did not, paradoxically, feel real. News demanded logic from its audience. Novels spoke to their emotions.
Back in the mid-2000s, I didn’t yet have the understanding I now have of the media industry and the business of politics. As a child, I remember seeing Iranians depicted on French TV as unhinged individuals raiding embassies and burning foreign flags. What Persepolis achieved in France, and more importantly in the United States, was to carve out a space for a cheeky, witty Iranian girl and her endearing family to hold the spotlight. Told in comic strips, the story was part funny, part dramatic — the stuff real life is made of. I would have a more elaborate and critical reading of it now, but to spark interest in the humanity of ordinary Iranians, at a time when Western media had spent decades portraying them as frightening and deceitful was a remarkable accomplishment.
Marjane went on to publish two more graphic novels: Chicken with Plums, a melancholic meditation on love and mortality, and Embroideries, an irreverent and affectionate portrait of Iranian women speaking about marriage, social conventions and sexuality. Then, she turned her focus to filmmaking and painting.
Decades into her career as a successful visual artist, film director and graphic novelist, she still declined to call herself an artist. Being an artist was subjective. Like being funny or beautiful, it’s something others said about you, not something you said about yourself.
No discussion of Marjane’s work would be complete without mentioning her political convictions. Her bête noire was patriarchy, wherever it manifested itself—in society or in politics.
She was known for being a straight-talker and an avid smoker, and maintained she never had an interest in being someone’s mother. At a 2017 event at Stanford, she told the audience: “If I had a daughter, the first word I would teach her would be to say fuck-off, not hello, or good morning.”
Having lived in the Islamic Republic, Marjane had experienced the policing of her body and mind. She detested the conservative culture that demanded women conform to a prescribed image. “When I was younger, I was told, ‘a lady would not do this, a lady would not do that.’ That’s the point of view of the patriarchy to keep women at home. In the end, I said: I’m a loud, irreverent woman, but at least I’m free to do whatever I want. I’m not a lady? Fine, the hell with it. Don’t call me a lady. Just call me by my first name.”
After Mahsa Jina Amini died in the custody of the morality police in 2022, sparking mass protests and giving rise to Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement, Marjane became an outspoken activist. She returned to drawing, and invited contributions from artists, journalists and academics, for a graphic work of non-fiction. Published on the first anniversary of Amini’s death, the work, titled Woman, Life, Freedom, traced the societal and cultural shifts unfolding in Iran.
Marjane saw patriarchy at play in politics too. It was the same logic that cast some nations as beacons of democracy and others as backward states in need of being led there by a firm, knowing hand.
In 2006, speaking with Emma Watson, she pointed to military interventions by the U.S.: “The thinking seems to have been that because you go and throw bombs in Afghanistan and put in Coca-Cola machines that it suddenly becomes a democracy. Bullshit!” The only viable change, she believed, was the “slow evolution of culture.”
A year before that, speaking to Spiegel magazine, she criticized the U.S. role in Iran’s politics, apparently referring to the 1953 Coup against Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. “If you look at the last century, the U.S. did not want to democratize us out of sympathy, but because of our oil. When there is no more oil, they will leave us standing like an aging prostitute at a street corner.” If we want democracy, she added, “we must decide for ourselves. We must fight for our own freedom.”
Marjane appears to have stayed true to the belief that political change must be homegrown, not engineered from outside. She had little patience for social media and was not one to broadcast her views online. As far as I can tell, she did not join those in the Iranian diaspora calling on the Trump administration to bomb Iran into freedom.
In the last twelve months, Iran has endured another wave of internal protests that left at least 6,500 dead as well as two rounds of U.S.-Israeli military strikes: the first in June 2025, and a second campaign beginning in February 2026. Iranian casualties from the latter stand at a minimum of 1,700 civilians killed and more than 20,000 wounded. Schools, hospitals, universities, bridges, residential buildings and UNESCO World Heritage sites have been destroyed. A ceasefire is nominally in place but has been repeatedly violated. There is no sign of tensions receding.
I don’t know what Marjane felt living through all of this. What’s known is the depth of the personal grief she was carrying at the same time. In April 2025, she lost Mattias Ripa, her confidant and intellectual partner, with whom she shared her life for 31 years. She who had borne witness for so many Iranians and women had lost the witness to her own life.
Marjane once described solitude as “a voyage into one’s interiority,” a state of mind she adored. In recent years, she had narrowed her circle of friends. Time is “the only” precious thing in life, she said; “almost everything” else can be replaced. “I don’t even have enough time for the people I love. Why would I waste it on people I don’t care about?”
Ten months after her husband’s passing, she announced the establishment of a foundation under the French Academy of Fine Arts (Académie des Beaux-Arts) to support foreign students studying cinema in Paris. The initiative was the “logical continuity” of what she and Ripa represented, two foreigners who met and built their lives “in this incredible city.” Each year, she wanted to meet the two selected fellows and guide them on their path, she said.
After Marjane’s passing, I reached out to the friend alongside whom I had first heard her speak.
I asked François, who is French-Iranian, what he remembered from that evening more than two decades ago. The contrast between her physical stature and her “oversized presence when she spoke,” he replied immediately. He recalled sensing “a broken soul” beneath “her cold magma erupting words,” a “sense of purpose” paired with “bottomless desperation.” François paused before settling on the term “artiste maudite” to describe her: someone who uses artistic expression as an outlet for “feelings that haunt them.” She seemed to oscillate between “a bright urge to change the world” and a darker pull toward the “improbability of her quest.”
Marjane had talked about battling depression early on in her career. She was known for her intensity and her passion. What was less visible perhaps was the existentialism she seemed to grapple with in midlife. In a 2020 conversation on France Culture, she said the last thing she wanted to tell herself before dying was “at least you understood something.” When the host observed, “You talk a lot about death,” she shot back: “How could I not? I’m going to die, so of course I do. This whole thing is badly designed: I’m fifty years old and I understand how life works a lot better than I did at twenty, which means that at eighty, I’ll understand it a hell of a lot better than I do now. And just when I begin to really understand how it all works, I’ll have to die. How can anyone make peace with that?”
The statement released by her family said she had “died of sadness” after Ripa’s passing. In recent days, some took to social media to speculate, insinuating suicide or overdose. Others stated it outright. The statement’s vagueness was, of course, intentional, reflecting discretion and an Iranian penchant for speaking in images and symbols, a reticence to name what is better left to the imagination, or understood with the heart.
To Iranians there is little ambiguity about what the statement meant. Dying of sadness is a specific term in the Persian language. Degh kardan. When I was a child, one of my lovebirds withered away after its companion dropped dead beside him. Broken heart, I was told, and even as a ten-year-old, I understood what it meant to no longer be on the side of life. What is ambiguous about losing the will to live due to acute loneliness, a sense of exile from oneself, or the loss of illusions we once held dear?
Marjane never returned to Iran after the success of Persepolis, effectively spending the rest of her life away from her homeland. Home had only one meaning, and that was Iran, she wrote in the New York Times in 2009. Yet she refused to dwell on it. To complain about living in exile felt indecent when Iranians inside Iran were contending with far more pressing hardships. “I’d rather keep this sadness within me,” she said in 2020, “but yes, it is present.”
Only those closest to Marjane will know what her final months were made of. How she lived through the loss of her life partner, the deaths of thousands of her compatriots, and the bombing of Iran under the pretense of liberation.
Unlike many in the diaspora, Marjane never cast aside her Iranian identity. I’ve met Iranians abroad who said they wanted to move on and forget Iran entirely. Some felt that loyalty to their adopted country required burying their origins. Marjane chose otherwise: “Even if I studied in France and write in French, everything that I am, everything I have become, I owe it to my country. I owe it to Iran,” she said. “My heart is Iranian and this, no one can take from me.”
Ladane Nasseri is a narrative nonfiction writer and former Bloomberg foreign correspondent. She writes A Fine Dispersal.
A Fine Dispersal publishes essays and conversations at the intersection of literature, history, place and human lives.
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