I agree, it seems we all agree: her losses, her sense of guilt, reinforced by her grandmother and the resentment of her sister, gave her a low sense of self-esteem—not to mention, just as she is coming into womanhood, the rising of a regime that wants to keep women out of the larger world, to deny them power and self-direction. She hoped her marriage would fill the void of loneliness, but as her friend Ava observes much later, if you don’t love yourself, nothing can fill that void. She did not have the confidence to reach out and express her needs to Farzad, to develop an intimacy over time; she took minor rebuffs to heart more than Ava would have, and nursed resentments as much as her sense of guilt.