SAID SAYRAFIEZADEH -- When Skateboards Will Be Free November 15, 2010

"When Skateboards Will Be Free is a brave, honest and elegant book. It felt like the story was being whispered in my ear. I haven’t read a memoir in quite a while that has so skillfully made sense of an American childhood." -- Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin


“The revolution is not only inevitable, it is imminent. It is not only imminent, it is quite imminent. And when the time comes, my father will lead it.”

With a profound gift for capturing the absurd in life, and a deadpan wisdom that comes from surviving a surreal childhood in the Socialist Workers Party, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh has crafted an unsentimental, funny, heartbreaking memoir.

Saïd’s Iranian-born father and American Jewish mother had one thing in common: their unshakable conviction that the workers’ revolution was coming. Separated since their son was nine months old, they each pursued a dream of the perfect socialist society. Pinballing with his mother between makeshift Pittsburgh apartments, falling asleep at party meetings, longing for the luxuries he’s taught to despise, Said waits for the revolution that never, ever arrives. “Soon,” his mother assures him, while his long-absent father quixotically runs as a socialist candidate for president in an Iran about to fall under the ayatollahs. Then comes the hostage crisis. The uproar that follows is the first time Saïd hears the word “Iran” in school. There he is suddenly forced to confront the combustible stew of his identity: as an American, an Iranian, a Jew, a socialist... and a middle-school kid who loves football and video games.

Poised perfectly between tragedy and farce, here is a story by a brilliant young writer struggling to break away from the powerful mythologies of his upbringing and create a life—and a voice—of his own. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s memoir is unforgettable.



“[Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is a name] that you may want to remember…if this exacting and finely made first book is any indication…[He] writes with extraordinary power and restraint…[His] prose has some of [Isaac Bashevis] Singer’s wistful comedy, and good deal of that writer’s curiosity about the places where desire, self-sacrifice and societal obligation intersect and collide.” -- New York Times

When Skateboards Will Be Free was selected as one of the ten best books of 2009 by Dwight Garner of The New York Times. His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times Book Review, and numerous other publications. Born in Brooklyn to a Jewish American mother and an Iranian father, raised in Pittsburgh, Saïd lives in New York City with his wife Karen Mainenti.