“Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe,” says Azar Nafisi at a low point in her book, "Reading Lolita in Tehran".

She is sitting in her emptied living room, with notes strewn around her, and she is thinking about her decision to leave Iran.

“If you’re forced into having sex with someone you dislike, you make your mind blank—you pretend to be somewhere else,” she explains. “That’s what we do over here. We are constantly pretending to be somewhere else—we either plan it or dream it.”

After being dismissed from her job as a professor at the University of Tehran for refusing to wear a veil, Nafisi decided to take a risk and fulfill a dream. For the next two years she met in secret with seven former students, all young women. They would remove their veils, shake out their hair, and read classic, banned works of Western literature in her living room.

In those pages—ranging from Virginia Woolf to Vladimir Nabokov—they found escapism, their own reflections, inspiration and an appreciation of life even in repressive times.

Throughout her book, Nafisi and her students find they especially identify with many of the characters and themes of Nabokov’s books. Lolita is the scandalous tale of a young girl’s relationship with a man so obsessed with her, he marries her widowed mother and plots ways to molest her.

But, “the desperate truth of Lolita’s story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man,” says Nafisi. Rather, it is the “confiscation of one individual’s life by another.” And therein lies one of the central issues of her book.

Throughout her book, she shows readers this delicate line between fiction and reality. Her students battle within themselves, and within their environment, to find where they belong.