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Marjane Satrapi answered a question—in the world of men, God is a woman

Marjane Satrapi, the 56-year-old Iranian-French writer and director, passed away Thursday.

Marjane Satrapi died of sadness. It sounds like the kind of ending she would have mocked and understood in equal measure. For a woman who spent a lifetime insisting that politics was personal, it somehow makes perfect sense.

The 56-year-old Iranian-French writer and director best known for her graphic work Persepolis, passed away Thursday. Even her death seems like an act of rebellion.

Her family informed the press that she had “died of sadness” following the death of her husband, long-time collaborator, and Swedish actor Mattias Ripa, who passed away in April 2025. For someone who rebelled against every form of oppression, she refused to be oppressed by the grief of losing the ‘love of her life’.

Her death, like her works, feels personal. Perhaps that is how every reader or viewer feels when an author or filmmaker they could connect with passes away. I was introduced to Persepolis (2007) as a 21 year old liberal arts student by a friend who called it a ‘must watch’. Reluctant at first, I watched it before I read it.

Persepolis (2007) felt like a feminist manifesto. This was a woman who was allowed to be contradictory on the page — angry and vulnerable, political and frivolous, rebellious and frightened.

While for a lot of people, it was a mirror to the Iranian regime’s horrors, to me it was political and personal in the way it dealt with God and his believers.

Satrapi wanted to be a prophet when she grew up, God ended up being her BFF. In her emotional universe, God was not what the fundamentalists told you, God was someone who would never turn up at the right time because he was perhaps too busy watching Breaking Bad. How many people can one entity—real or not—cater to in a world where everyone is looking for the right answers at the right time?

The quote goes something like: “Why doesn’t God come to Marjane the night she decides to be a revolutionary? Is it because he doesn’t agree with violence? Or is he just catching up on Breaking Bad?”

Living on her own terms

Something that amused me was her nickname marji. In colloquial Hindi, marji is will. In Urdu, it is marzee. For a woman, who lived life on her own terms,........

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