One cannot fathom the difficulty a young girl would face growing up during a time of war and chaos. In the autobiographies Persepolis and The Dairy of a Young Girl, the reader is shown that both main characters Marjane Satrapi and Anne Frank lived similar yet different lives. Their lives, as told in their autobiographies, consisted of adversity, cultural conflicts, and political issues, while after their novels were published both Anne and Marjane rose to fame.
Anne, born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt Germany, shares her personal experiences and first-hand encounters during World War II in her novel. Anne along with her upper-middle-class family; which included her mother Edith, father Otto and sister Margot, fled Nazi persecution of Jews and went into hiding for two years. Her …show more content…
At just ten years old Marjane grew up during the Cultural Revolution in Iran. Satrapi was the only child of her parents, Her father Ebi Satrapi was an engineer and her mother Taji Satrapi was a clothing designer. She grew up in Tehran, where she attended the Lycee Francais. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Marjane and her family's Western attributes drew the wrong kind of attention and were forced to change their lifestyle. During the revolution, her French non-religious school was abolished and made boys and girls separate for education. "We found ourselves veiled and separated from our friends" (Satrapi, 10). In 1984, when her parents sent her to Austria to attend school (Luebering, J.E. Marjane Satrapi | Iranian Artist and Writer) she had difficulty leaving her family behind, "Nothing's worse than saying goodbye. It's a little like dying" (Satrapi, 117). She writes that the purpose of her novel Persepolis was to show that Iran is not a country of fundamentalists and terrorists, and the characterizations and stereotypes of the country by the West are