“Our revolution set us back fifty years. It will take generations for all this to evolve. You only have one life. It’s your duty to live it well.” So Marjane Satrapi’s father, a loving and smart man, tells her at the Tehran airport, sending her off to exile from her homeland in one of the last panels of Persepolis, an artfully drawn graphic memoir that has inspired many other books of its kind, such as Eleanor Davis’ The Hard Tomorrow and Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass.

Satrapi’s story opens in a time of torment, when Iran, long ago invaded by Arabs and Mongols and more recently economically colonized by Great Britain and the United States, is under the rule of an autocratic, aloof shah. Young Marjane’s mother is photographed participating in an anti-government demonstration. When the image lands on the covers of magazines around the world, she dyes her hair, dons dark shades, lives in fear. In a few years both her parents will take roles in the revolution that overthrows the Pahlavi dynasty only for the country to fall under the control of a reactionary theocracy that demands that women wear the chador and isn’t reluctant to beat and imprison anyone who doesn’t comply.

Satrapi, by her own account, is an imp and uncommonly smart. At the age of 6, she decides that she is a prophet only to have the bearded mullahs deny the possibility because of her gender. Religion gives way to irreligion as the religious police become ever more oppressive; pride in being Iranian and heir to the ancient center-of-the-world metropolis that gives her book its name leads to disgust with a regime that throws away hundreds of thousands of young men in a pointless religious war with neighboring Iraq.

As a teenager, Satrapi leaves for Vienna, where she discovers all that has been forbidden: drugs, anarchist politics, feminism, rock music, sex. (And bad hair, since it’s the early 1980s.) Living in a boardinghouse run by grim nuns, she discovers that “in every religion, you find the same extremists.” After years abroad, ill and homeless, she returns to her parents’ home to discover just how extreme religious extremism can be and that there’s no room in a theocratic hell for the likes of her.

An omnibus edition of Persepolis, published for its 20th anniversary, comes at a time when, Satrapi writes in a new introduction, a few rays of hope can be seen on the horizon. “Why am I hopeful?” she asks, answering that for the first time in Iranian history a revolution is building, led by women, and “women and men are fighting together, hand in hand for their freedom.” A generation of Iranians too young to remember why things are as they are increasingly rejects “gender apartheid and patriarchal culture, which are the biggest enemies of democracy.” Those young people are fearless—and, Satrapi notes, the government appears to be cowed enough to concede at least a few points, adding, “a dictatorship that is ready to accept reform is no longer a dictatorship.”

We can only hope that she’s right. Meanwhile, Persepolis stands in defiant resistance alongside other classics of its kind, from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” and Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Twenty years on, it remains urgent, necessary reading.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.