In the 1980s, when Azadeh Moaveni faced the annual first-day-of-school ritual that involved her teachers mispronouncing her name and then asking about its origins, she briefly toyed with the idea of changing her name to Elizabeth.

“I wasn’t sure what made me feel more wretched: feeling embarrassed to be Iranian, or feeling guilty at being embarrassed,” Moaveni writes in her new memoir, Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran (PublicAffairs, £25.). “Saying I was Persian helped, but no one knew what or where Persia was, and there would often be follow-up questions.”

Born and raised in northern California, Moaveni always felt caught between two cultures. From a young age, she alternatively surrendered to, and resisted, assimilation into mainstream America. She dreamed of a legendary Persian homeland and served tea to her elders, but also danced to Madonna and practised yoga like any other Californian girl.

In the late ’90s, Moaveni visited Tehran as a correspondent for Time magazine on her Iranian passport. Her upper-middle-class family in Tehran delighted in their new game of critiquing which parts of Azadeh were authentically Iranian, which parts American, and which parts they should try to change. At first, Moaveni only spoke “kitchen Farsi” – she could gossip and say which auntie had slighted whom, but she couldn’t talk about abstract concepts.

By 2000, when Moaveni had moved to Iran, much attention was paid to the body as a political canvas. Many women out on the streets had forgone the all-concealing roopoosh uniform. They wore open-toed sandals, brightly coloured headscarves, and lipstick.

Whether she’s negotiating with a relative about her preference for energy bars versus oily rice, or being interrogated by intelligence agents about her professional integrity, Moaveni deftly communicates the complications of having multiple nationalities. Lipstick Jihad is a fascinating, accessible book for anybody interested in modern Iran or cross-cultural identity.

Moaveni is now based in Beirut, and is co-writing the memoirs of Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. When we recently met for iced coffee and a chat at a Manhattan café, I noticed that Moaveni wore a sheer lip gloss.

In the acknowledgements of Lipstick Jihad, you write, “This book wasn’t meant to be a memoir, but… it turned out that way”. What was it intended as?

The thing that I had envisioned was using people in my life to illustrate what young people are going through. In some long forms of literary journalism, there is a writer in the first person. You’re there, but just as an observer.

But a place like Iran seems very foreign to American readers. Personal stories have much more immediacy and appeal to readers. It would be a way to open it up to a much wider audience – rather than picking up a non-fiction book of reportage.

Why did you originally go to Cairo after university instead of Tehran?

I had been sort of dismissive of all these hyphenated people who went back, and thought it was really clichéd.
There was no Fulbright [American scholar program] to Iran; there was no obvious next step. I also felt that my understanding of the Arab world was insufficient. And this would give me a way to understand the region.

If you’re trying to get coverage that really illustrates people, like how a society or community or country is going through great upheaval (or coming out of one) so much of that is intimate and psychologically complex. To really be able to render that, I don’t see how you could do that via a translator. It’s too hard. A lot of journalists go out there and they spend six months on a course, and suddenly it’s like, ‘We’re all Arabic speakers now…’ None of those people can really function in Arabic. I studied it full-time in Cairo, where I lived for a year, and I’m the first to admit that my Arabic is lacking. I wanted to be at the point where I could sit with a family for hours, listen to them, and have them feel that I’m an organic part of their group. Those are the kind of stories I would like to be able to write about. Part of being a journalist is getting close to people. You have to make people want to spend long periods of time with you if you’re going to do an in-depth profile. They have to learn about you. People don’t have the patience for that after an hour’s translation. They’re like, ‘take the reporter away, we want to have dinner now!’

Studying at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and living in the San Francisco Bay Area, you were exposed to a particular flavour of body politics that is unique even in the US – lots of bare flesh, women with body hair, piercings everywhere and tattoos. How did this impact on you when you got to Iran?

Especially in Santa Cruz, we were very conscious about the politics of the body on lots of levels. In the multicultural sense, people of colour were reclaiming identity through dreadlocks or other appropriations. It was the sort of thing you pay a lot of attention to if you’re learning theory for the first time at the age of twenty. There was definitely a framework already in my mind of wider issues – the politics of place, of self in relation to community.

Before you arrived in Iran, did you know that wearing make-up would cause such a riot?

I had no idea, really. I was used to the third-world-mimicking-European make-up that would come from my mother and aunties. But that was completely separate. When I got there I thought it was a preoccupation with the face. It was really only after I started living there and seeing how all of these things were symbolic of other things.

When I first started going in 1998, wearing make-up in public didn’t happen all that much. It was people who were very rebellious and obviously very accustomed to scuffling with the morality police. It was not at all widespread. By 2000, when I moved there, wearing make-up was ordinary. Honestly, I would walk down the street and there would be women who looked like clowns. It was on the level of, if you saw them here in the US, you would think they were schizophrenic or mentally ill.

Farsi is wrapped up with family, poetry and identity for you. It seems like you were determined to master the language to find a key to unlocking secrets of Iran, so that you wouldn’t feel any more cultural displacement.

When I was trying so hard and struggling, I thought it was everything. I think I thought that at the time because it was something that I could control. I thought, well, it’s not that hard to just memorise a vast number of words and then fit right in. There’s the solution!

Once my Farsi became really fluent, colloquial even, I realised that it wasn’t really the key to anything at all. It didn’t answer any of my own questions about self. But it was very instrumental to my feeling more of a part of my Iranian friends’ lives.

Living in Iran, are things different when you go back to California?

It’s great. My mother’s English is fluent. But Farsi, that’s the language she really excels at. We can talk about anything in English. But when we want to kick back and talk about nothing for hours, we speak Farsi.