When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir of a Political Childhood by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

When Skateboards Will Be Free is a humorous and affecting memoir about a mother and son, and how the son gradually realizes that his parents have scrambled his worldview.

(Dial, 287 pages, $22)

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s mother had a ready answer whenever her young son asked her why his father had left them. “Mahmoud went off to fight for a world socialist revolution,” she’d say. Those words didn’t explain why Saïd’s father continued to live nearby, but they did help the boy believe that the lonely, impoverished life that he and his mother shared in Pittsburgh served a greater purpose. Saïd’s Iranian father had been a graduate student new to America when his mother, a white suburban New Yorker, married him. In the 1960s, a routine sidewalk encounter with a handful of campus socialists changed their lives. Mahmoud became a traveling lecturer, his wife a Socialist Workers Party go-fer. Suffering was the way she served the cause.

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