Exile’s Return by GAIUTRA BAHADUR

The subtitle of “Honeymoon in Tehran,” an engaging new book from the author of “Lipstick Jihad,” promises “two years of love and danger in Iran.” But while Azadeh Moaveni does indeed deliver details of her romance with the son of an Iranian textile tycoon, there’s another, more intriguing relationship at the core of this memoir.

It’s embodied by a certain Mr. X, the intelligence agent the Islamic Republic has assigned to shadow Moaveni’s movements as a reporter for Time magazine. “For a long while,” she observes, “he behaved like a controlling husband.” On and off over seven years, Moaveni and her minder meet in anonymous hotel rooms and play psychological games. Citing national security constraints, he insists on the secrecy of their rendezvous. And he presses to know what she’s writing, who she’s interviewing, what her circle of sources and friends is up to. She struggles to read him: is he the uncomplicated thug of a mullah state or simply a man in a job, with doubts about the regime he represents? Mr. X is, of course, a stand-in for Iran, and her fascination with this elusive figure mirrors her fraught relationship with the country her parents left in 1976 and with the religion that, in the hands of ascendant ayatollahs, kept them from returning after the revolution.

For Moaveni, born and raised in California, Iran is both an intimate and a stranger, a familiar motherland and an alienating theocracy that requires permits for musical instruments and prohibits coed wedding receptions. Yet it isn’t only the contradictions of a child of exiles sorting out her identity crisis that makes this book worthwhile. It’s the seductive contradictions of the motherland itself.