In 2001, 20-year-old Zarah Ghahramani was grabbed off the streets of her native Tehran and taken to the city’s notorious Evin prison, where countless political prisoners-together with prostitutes, thieves, murderers, and the criminally insane-have been held without trial, and beaten, tortured, and killed. Her crime was taking part in demonstrations at Tehran University against the repression of human rights. For 30 days she was interrogated and tortured to extract from her a false confession and the names of her associates.

Ghahramani’s release was finally brokered by a former boyfriend with connections to the regime, but she was found guilty of, among other things, “writing articles critical of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran”. Forbidden to return to university, she emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, four years ago, when anonymous phone calls to her home made it clear that she was still being watched and tracked. The price of a normal life in Iran was apparently her total silence.

Ghahramani, however, has been anything but silent since arriving in Australia. She spoke to the Straight by telephone about her important new memoir, My Life as a Traitor (Douglas & McIntyre, $25.50, hardcover), a fearless record of her time in Evin, which she wrote with her friend Australian journalist Richard Hillman.

“When I arrived in Australia I was still recovering from my time in prison, and my father said to me on the phone one night, ”˜Write it out as a book, get it out of your system. Put it on the bookshelf and don’t ever be scared of it.’”¦I didn’t want to publish it under my name,” said Ghahramani, who is still amazed that a book that began as her catharsis went to auction among publishers in five countries. “But all my friends said ”˜Don’t hide, do interviews, everything, because then the Iranian government will be scared to do anything to you or your family.’ ”

Ghahramani is particularly skillful in capturing the speed with which the psyche collapses under torture. When her captors press her for the names of friends involved in political activities, she is helpless in face of her fear. “There are tears you weep when you discover that your fear of pain is stronger than your conviction,” she writes. “These are the tears you cry when you hate yourself. Dear God, I’d always believed that I’d be so much stronger, that I’d resist and resist until death if need be. But it’s not true. I am not the person I hoped I would be.”

When asked what part of the book was most difficult to write, Ghahramani, now 27, paused and drew a deep breath. “When they cut off my hair,” she responded quietly. In a country where women are not supposed to show their hair in public, the symbolic rape is implicit. “It’s unbelievable how that feels for a woman. It’s part of your identity.”

In chapters alternating with those in which she fearlessly chronicles her incarceration, Ghahramani, who was born just after the 1979 revolution, draws on her own family experience as the daughter of Kurdish parents—a Zoroastrian and a Muslim—to trace the history of Iran and its layers of culture, language, and religion. The dual narrative of My Life as a Traitor brilliantly captures the disconnect between the liberties of private life and the rules governing public life.

Ghahramani insists hers is a personal story, not a political one, but there is an immense power to My Life as a Traitor, a work that draws back the veil on a culture that is still so poorly understood in the West. “Australian women always say to me, ”˜Oh, you must be very happy to not have to wear the scarf,’ ” Ghahramani said. “But I am happy to be a free woman who is walking down the road and is not scared of getting kidnapped. I don’t care about the scarf.”

Indeed, the range of opinion about veils or head scarves among women who actually wear them is rarely registered in western media. Even Ghahramani’s own publisher misrepresents the scarf as the source of her rebellion, noting in the jacket blurb that “[Ghahramani’s] crime”¦was in wanting to slide back her headscarf to feel the sun on a few inches of her hair.” Except—small problem—this is not what Ghahramani writes at all.

“That’s just American marketing,” she exclaimed. “It’s got nothing to do with a scarf. One publisher even said that since people are used to Hollywood and happy endings, I should put a happy ending on the book. They kept bugging me until I said if they keep it up I’m going to cancel the whole contract. It’s my life. Maybe life isn’t about happy endings to stories.”