Set in postrevolutionary Tehran, and all the more poignant for its condensed brevity (141 pages in Persian), My Bird is the lightly plotted coming-of-age story of a writer. It is the first-person narrative of a nameless thirty-five-year-old woman who lives with her husband and two children and shares certain biographical details with the author. Although originally the narrator resents being the sole caretaker of her two children, eventually she comes to view motherhood neither as stifling nor as her sole mission in life. She neither begrudges her maternal responsibilities nor does she romanticize motherhood.

The novel focuses on the search for and the emergence of an individual female self and on the liberating potential of storytelling. Its narrator vows to explore her life, her feelings, and her surroundings more carefully, and to describe them as accurately as she can. Reconstructing and reinscribing her subjectivity, she inches her way out of alienation and isolation and moves from an existential crisis to self-awareness and self-revelation. All the silence and secrecy and fear, all the scenes repressed but not forgotten, all the feelings buried but not dead that she carried around like the “hump” (10) of a hunchback, come unglued over the course of the novel. Like a freed bird, they fly out of the cage of their captivity.