I was expelled from the university for refusing to wear the veil. Later, in 1997, I decided to leave the country. Now, my book has been a best seller in America. This is the irony of life. Unfortunately, sometimes we have to be deprived of what we have in order to appreciate it. This experience keeps coming up. But what I wanted to convey in my book was that my situation was not that exceptional. I wanted to talk not so much about myself, but about so-called ordinary people in Iran—those whose voices we don't hear as much because we always hear about the elite. I wanted to express the kind of ordinary courage a young woman or a young man has in the face of an oppressive situation.