An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah

An Enduring Love is the memoir of Shahbanou Farah Pahlavi, Iran's last empress — her own account of a life that carried her from an architecture student to the wife of the Shah and, at the 1967 coronation, to Empress of Iran. Published in English in 2004, it quickly became one of the most widely read memoirs of the Pahlavi family.

The book opens the private world of the palace: her courtship and marriage to Mohammad Reza Shah, the years of the reign as she lived them, and above all her cultural and social work championing the arts, education, and welfare. She also writes of the darkest chapters — the Shah's illness in exile, the family's wanderings after the revolution, and the grief of losing her daughter, Princess Leila Pahlavi.

For the diaspora, the memoir offers a human, intimate portrait of the Pahlavi family that official political narratives rarely capture. It is the personal, emotional record of imperial Iran's final years — a story of love, duty, and exile told in the voice of Shahbanou Farah Pahlavi herself.