[image-1]Roxana wants to do the whole band (Oh, and she's going to). So says the opening line of her explosive new memoir, The Last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage.
She wastes no time gently easing us in. That's just not her style. Roxana grabs readers on page 1 and jerks us into a backstage dressing room with the likes of Motley Crue, mere moments before she bares all. She dares us to look away.
It might seem daunting to pick up a book featuring a 10-year-old girl in a hijab with the word "slut" plastered over her face. Yet, shock value manages to play only a peripheral role in this tell-all account of an Iranian refugee's plunge into the sexual underbelly of rock 'n roll.
We realize almost immediately that Roxana isn't the groupie we were expecting. Somehow being a self-proclaimed slut doesn't quite gel with her off-handed mentions of conversing in Greek with Tommy Lee or rolling out of a drug-infused orgy only to realize with annoyance that she's late for her first day volunteering at an animal shelter. [image-2]
[image-3]Shirazi aims to change our views on the word "slut," by exposing her life to us in frank, confessional detail.
Born into the throes of the Iranian Revolution of the late ’70s to a family of political activists, Roxana reminisces about her childhood in Tehran as an enchanted thing — anti-Shah uprisings, a deadbeat father, nights in prison and sexual abuse be damned.
When we follow 5-year-old Roxana into the cellar below her grandmother's kitchen (which may or may not have been housing grandpa's remains), we realize there's something different about this little girl. She stands, petrified and euphoric in the dark dangerous unknown, allowing the sensation to buzz through her body like a drug. She loves it, and suddenly we understand why she'll spend her adulthood seducing untouchable rock stars.
Roxana's life unfurls at breakneck speed. We watch her flee Tehran for a dank council flat in Manchester (the British equivalent of a housing project), where she is tormented at school for being dark-skinned and routinely beaten by her stepfather. She pummels through childhood and emerges on the other side as a headstrong feminist, dedicated to both her academia and countless seedy nights in tour buses and dressing rooms. She pays the bills by belly dancing in the scourge of Central London's Soho, and splits her passion between Virginia Woolf and Axl Rose.
Roxana hides nothing. She calls herself a nerd and admits to having held onto her virginity until age 24. She drags us onto the ambulance ride following her cocaine-induced seizure, the hospital room where she is pressured into aborting her baby, and a frozen field in Canada where she is deserted by a notorious keyboardist in the dead of night.
She aggressively seeks out her next hit of danger-induced pleasure and acquires her own level of infamy in the process. She only hits snags when she breaks her cardinal rule: never fall in love.
Though at times the reader may feel that Roxana is keeping us, like her lovers, at an arm's length, there is no shortage of raw honesty regarding the debauchery she found behind the scenes.
The Last Living Slut is not for the touchy or faint of heart. However, for those seeking to peek behind the curtain of rock 'n roll's no access zone and keep an open mind to Roxana's unique brand of feminism, this book is a journey well worth taking.
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