All the Parts We Exile by Roza Nozari

Paperback. ISBN: 103900704X

Winner of the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers and shortlisted for the 2025 Toronto Book Award, All the Parts We Exile is a luminous and deeply personal memoir by artist and writer Roza Nozari exploring family, migration, queerness, identity, and the complicated search for belonging across generations and borders.

Born in Canada shortly after her parents emigrated from Iran, Roza Nozari grew up suspended between worlds. As the youngest daughter in an Iranian immigrant family, she longed for connection to a homeland she knew mostly through food, stories, and memory. Sharing a love of Iranian cuisine and cultural traditions with her mother, Roza developed an emotional attachment to Iran long before she ever visited it herself.

When she finally travels there, the country’s warmth, sensory richness, and extended family embrace deepen her longing for connection. Yet beneath the comforting stories surrounding her family’s immigration lies an unease she cannot fully explain. Her mother’s carefully repeated version of the past feels incomplete, polished around hidden fractures.

As Roza grows older, her search for cultural belonging evolves into a deeper quest for personal truth. Feminist theory, queer identity, and political awareness reshape how she understands herself and her family history. Conversations with her mother slowly reveal buried complexities: revolutionary politics, sacrifice, ambivalence about marriage, displacement, and the emotional costs of survival.

In lyrical, thoughtful prose, All the Parts We Exile intertwines Roza’s own evolving relationship to queerness with her mother’s untold history, creating an intimate portrait of two women navigating identity, expectation, exile, and inherited silence. The memoir explores not only the challenge of coming into oneself as a queer Muslim woman, but also the complicated realities of finding belonging within both queer communities and diasporic cultural histories.

Tender, intelligent, and emotionally resonant, this award-winning memoir offers a nuanced exploration of family memory, intergenerational feminism, queer Iranian identity, migration, and self-discovery.

A beautifully layered memoir about the stories families preserve, the truths they bury, and the courage required to reclaim every fragmented part of oneself.