A Pittsburgh Child

I just read Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's memoir about growing up as the son of an Iranian father and Jewish mother who were members of the Socialist Worker's Party. Most of the reviews stressed the voluntary poverty of his mother when she was raising him alone in Pittsburgh and following her Trotskyite party, but in my view the book is equally about growing up as a minority, an Iranian, in an America obsessed with bombing Iran during the hostage crisis.
The story includes his father's egotistical neglect, his mother's puritanical adherence to radical dogma, and his own attempts to blend in to American life. I'd been thinking about Frank McCourt again following his passing, and Sayrafiezadeh's "When Skateboards Will Be Free" is a hard portrait like McCourt's "Angela's Ashes".