In Reading Lolita in Tehran, creative endeavours—in particular, the writing and dissemination of literature—are used or misused by different people to achieve different ends. In this respect, the memoir serves as both a celebration of what art can achieve while also cautioning against the ways it can be distorted or manipulated, with harmful results.

For Nafisi, the single greatest example of the abuse of literature and creativity is found in the regime of the Islamic Republic. From early in the memoir, Nafisi argues that art suffers under the Islamic regime because the regime wishes to exercise strict control over artistic productions, declaring what is and is not acceptable according to its own ideology. As Nafisi writes, the Islamic regime creates a culture in which “literary works” are “important only when they [are] handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent—namely ideology” (25, emphasis added).

The regime’s emphasis on using art to promote its political and religious ideology has, Nafisi argues, a detrimental effect upon art aesthetically. She claims that in dubbing writers “the guardians of morality” (136), the regime “paralyze[s] them” and condemns them to “a kind of aesthetic impotence” (136). Nafisi suggests that this “aesthetic impotence” is the result of not being able to explore ideas freely, from multiple viewpoints and in sometimes controversial ways.