Some Mondays are worth looking forward to, and yesterday was one of them. That's because Sandhya and I went to see an author we both like tremendously, and the experience was better than we imagined. I'm talking about Marjane Satrapi, author of the two-part graphic novel Persepolis. We saw her speak at the State University of New York at Purchase.

If you've never read a graphic novel before--and I hadn't before Persepolis, other than thumbing through some of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series in college--then Persepolis is a great introduction. It's also an eye-opening look at life in Iran, one of the countries that U.S. politicians have labeled as part of an "axis of evil."

Persepolis is told over the course of two books, The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return. The books follow Satrapi from her youth in Iran to her education and coming of age in Europe back to her return to Iran as a young woman. It's hard not to fall in love with Marji (her nickname), who's inquisitive, opinionated, brave, and not afraid to admit her mistakes. In the first book, Marji describes how her life twists and turns from ages 6 to 14, including both the Islamic Revolution of 1979 that brought religious fundamentalists to power in Iran, and the eight-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

It's fascinating, as an American who never studied much modern history in school, to learn about these events. They help put the present situation in Iran and the Middle East in perspective. And seeing them through Marji's eyes lends them a human touch. Watching the news on TV or reading it in the paper, it's tempting to think that most people in Iran are just as dogmatic and religiously fanatic as their leaders, but Persepolis proves that's not so; there are good, intelligent, funny, open-minded people everywhere.

The lecture was a ton of fun and both Sandhya and I left with smiles. Satrapi is really smart and funny, not afraid to speak her mind, and her English is terrific. She talked a lot about why she chose to tell her story graphically, and how people always ask her why she didn't write a text memoir instead. "You wouldn't ask a moviemaker, 'Why didn’t you dance?'" she responds. Satrapi says she decided to write the books because she was sick of the preconceptions and biases that people in the West have about life in Iran.

One of the most interesting parts of the talk was her description of writing Persepolis. In other books, Satrapi uses a free-flowing style, but Persepolis is broken into short chapters made of small-framed panels; this approach allowed her to keep a necessary distance from the story. "My goal is to take the reader by the hand and say, 'I have a story to tell you, and you will listen to it, and I will never let your hand down.'"

Fans of Persepolis and people who've never read it are in for a real treat. Satrapi is working on an animated film version of Persepolis and hopes it will be released sometime next year. Yesterday was also the U.S. release of the English translation of her new book, Chicken With Plums, a really sad story about one of Satrapi's distant relatives. In the meantime, if you like her work and want to hear what she has to say, you can see if Satrapi may be coming to a city near you.

Have you read Persepolis? If so, what do you think? What did you like or not like about it? What did you learn?