My mum was forced to marry my dad when she was only twelve and started childbearing at the age of fourteen. By the time she was twenty-seven, she had seven children. Unlike my dad, who had finished primary school, she had never been given the chance to learn how to read and write because there was no mandatory education in Iran back in the 1950s.

My mother’s life was very much limited to the domestic sphere – a prison of domesticity and patriarchal values.