In her essay "The New Nomads," the Polish-born writer Eva Hoffman observes that while exile used to be considered a difficult condition, it has lately come into vogue, at least among those who study it, for supposedly embodying the qualities that define the postmodern experience: fragmented identity, dislocation and uncertainty. Exile, she writes, has become "sexy, glamorous, interesting." If this is true, it helps explain why so many memoirs by Iranian exiles have found their way into print lately. But Hoffman argues that while exiles indeed possess "a stark sense of biographical drama," the postmodern celebration of exile risks underestimating the real emotional and psychological burden of living between two worlds.

At the heart of this burden lies a sort of bipolar personal narrative; the story has a neat division, a before and an after, where the homeland represents an asymptote of fulfillment, a sustaining force in the story. For Iranians who came to America during the revolution and hostage crisis, keeping up with Iran was anything but chic; the shocking changes taking place there all but closed the chapter on pre-revolution Iran. Access--emotional as well as actual--was cut off, and memories of home were frozen in time. Exile means that the place you come from becomes unreal as it becomes untouchable; the exile's solace is the fantasy that he creates from these conditions.

But exile, however traumatic, can come with an expiration date--and in this case, the dawn of Iran chic is it. While Iranians who fled during the revolution can never re-create the world they knew, most can now travel with relative ease between the United States and Iran, something few did until recent years. They return with videos and photographs, and journalists provide accounts of changes on the ground. As Iran becomes a bit more accessible--indeed, as it pops up everywhere one looks--it turns out that nostalgia cannot stand up to reality. These days, when friends and family make the trip, there's a pathos to it, not because of the head scarves or the billboards covered with bloody martyrs, nor even because of the emotional reunion with relatives who never got to leave. The real pain of returning is the pain of concluding the fantasy and confronting the real Iran, which is neither as lovely nor as horrific as it is cast in either chapter of the before-and-after story. Hoffman describes this realization as "the loss of the very sense of loss."

Azadeh Moaveni, a 28-year-old Iranian-American journalist, explores the limits of nostalgia in Lipstick Jihad, the most recent of the Iran memoirs. Moaveni grew up in California, but after college she went to Iran to cover the 1999 student protests. In 2000 she returned as a stringer for Time, and was the only American journalist allowed to set up shop in the country during a period of serious upheaval. Her project in Lipstick Jihad is as much personal as political, recounting her efforts to find satisfaction in being Iranian, and to achieve a sense of belonging that eluded her in California. This wasn't easy, since she found herself hating some things about the new Iran. "If you are a nostalgic lover of Iran," an Iranian friend tells her, "you love your own remembrance of the past, the passions in your own life that are intertwined with Iran. If you love Iran realistically, you do so despite its flaws, because an affection that can't look its object in the face is a selfish one."

Heeding this advice, Moaveni tries to manage the ambivalence that results when the bipolar structure of exile falls apart--what to do when, as Hoffman puts it, paradise turns out to be "an ordinary garden, needing weeding, tilling, and watering." The details of Moaveni's homecoming are poignant: an elderly relative prepares sholeh-zard, a rice pudding scented with rose water and saffron, on which Moaveni's name is spelled out in cinnamon and almonds; the neighborhood fruit vendor greets her with exaggerated glee at her return. The author's capacity to appreciate these moments and yet look critically at political and social problems in the country is a kind of integration of nostalgia and reality that sets her story apart from what could have been a predictable homecoming tale.

Yet the balance is not entirely harmonious. As her stay in Iran wears on, her curiosity turns into exasperation, and her criticisms of the regime become increasingly intemperate. "It was impossible to respect the Islamic Republic," she declares, referring to mullahs as "pariahs, an untouchable class" who are ignored on the street by cabdrivers, and as "slatternly, corrupt, unworldly clerics, with village accents and scant ambitions" who "held meetings on the floor, sat slouched before the cameras, and mumbled about 'foreign enemies.'" Moaveni may be right--she walks us through enough harrowing security interviews, street protests and raids that it's clear she's no armchair quarterback of Iranian politics. But her sweeping remarks bear the proprietary confidence of judgment that one can levy only on one's own. Could a non-Iranian get away with calling a mullah "Jabba the Hut"?

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