Minister without Portfolio

From the author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ comes a globe-spanning memoir of identity, exile, and reinvention.

In many ways, Hooman Majd has led a charmed life: the son of a high-ranking diplomat in pre-Revolutionary Iran, he grew up in the upper echelons of Iranian society and in cosmopolitan diplomatic enclaves in San Francisco, London, and Washington, DC. In early adulthood, after Ayatollah Khomeini’s Revolution in 1979, Majd sold real estate to fellow Iranian exiles in Beverly Hills, tried his hand at writing, and found his way to the orbit of Chris Blackwell, the impresario of Island Records and mastermind behind the careers of Bob Marley & the Wailers, U2, and other global superstars. After rising through the ranks—and sometimes, but not always, the charts—Majd went on to write three influential books about his homeland and served as a consultant and contributor to NBC News on Iran. Yet, for all this authority and access, Majd could never truly call any place “home.”

As he recounts in his open-hearted memoir Minister without Portfolio—named for the tongue-in-cheek title Blackwell bestowed on him—Hooman Majd was always shadowed by a sense of precarity, even as he bantered with ambassadors’ wives at smoke-filled soirees or traded gossip with Grace Jones and Dennis Hopper at Goldeneye, Blackwell’s Jamaican estate and the former home of Ian Fleming. Majd had seen first-hand the havoc wrought on his family—and so many others—by the Iranian revolution. All his life, he has been questioned, frisked, or even threatened at points of entry. Though he has risked several return trips to Iran, today, officially, he can never go back. How can you build an identity when no place will claim you as its own?

Told with grace, insight, and longing—and filled with riotous, sometimes shocking portraits of larger-than-life personalities and illuminating insights about the entanglements between Iran and the West—Minister without Portfolio is a trenchant memoir of belonging nowhere and everywhere at once.

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