Petrusso is a history and screenwriting scholar and freelance writer and editor. In this essay, Petrusso argues that the home-based class Nafisi taught is not the heart of the story, but merely a frame for the primary concepts in the book.

In his review of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post spends nearly the whole of his piece analyzing only the book's first section, "Part I: Lolita." This is the introductory part of Azar Nafisi's memoir in which she primarily discusses the home-based literature class for women she organized after leaving her second major university appointment in Tehran in the mid-1990s. Yardley concludes his review by arguing:

Most of the rest of the book is concerned with her life before 1995. Because she is intelligent and thoughtful and writes well, this is frequently interesting, but for long stretches the...