Mahdokht Mimi Salili

Mahdokht Mimi Salili was born in Tabriz, Iran, on July 8 th, 1936, and died in San
Pablo, CA, on August 12 th , 2025.

Mimi was an Iranian American writer, artist and healthcare professional. In the
introduction of her forthcoming autobiography, she writes:

“the author of this account of an eventful and difficult life has never
sought to entertain the reader in the ordinary sense of the term by
glamorizing her past.”

Such an unmistakably realistic view of a complex and difficult life underpinned her
self-conception. She knew that the price of true freedom in life was nothing less
than courageous refusal to compromise with an unjust society. A society whose
chief enforcers are often members of one’s own family. That is precisely what she
did by leaving behind her family and the fascinating country of her birth, Iran, in
search of new horizons. In her own admirable formulation, she

“redefined her cultural identity without ever renouncing her profound ethical
principles.”

All it took was willpower. Nothing less.

Born to a wealthy and influential family in Iran in the 1930s, Mimi grew up in a
crowded household. Her mother, Fari Ghodevh, was a poet and a widely admired
philanthropist. Fari was the scion of a long line of scholars and poets who had
played a decisive role in shaping Iran’s modern intellectual and political landscape.
Fari instilled the love of poetry, world history and the French language in her five
daughters. Fari’s most famous ancestor was the Neoplatonist theologian and jurist,
Fazel Mollah Ahmad Naraghi (1771-1829), tutor and adviser to the Persian Qajar
King Fath Ali Shah (1772-1834). Naragi later became known as a major theorist
of resistance to royal injustice. Mimi seemed to have inherited this ancestral
penchant for rejecting injustice.

Mimi’s father, Abolhassan Salili, studied law and linguistics at Tehran University
in the 1920s. He met Mimi’s Mother, Fari, through her brother, Reza Ghodveh,
whom he had befriended at the university. Mr. Salili became an influential jurist
and senior judge in Iran.

From an early stage in her life, Mimi realized that the only way she could live a
life of her choice was by drawing on an inexhaustible willpower. Family support
was not an option afforded to her by her austere father. Working as an elementary
school teacher and a correspondent for “Young Asia”, a monthly progressive
Iranian literary review, she managed to earn enough money to leave Iran to study
healthcare in London in 1959. She was a brilliant nursing student. Working
concomitantly as a London correspondent for “Young Asia”, she wrote a few
noted articles on various aspects of British cultural and political life. Her
interviews with such British personalities as Sean Connery, Norman Wisdom and
Hugh Gaitskell drew a great deal of attention back in Iran.

An avid fan of culture, she covered many international exhibitions whilst
mastering classical ballroom dancing at the famed Victor Silvester Studios in
London.

Her remarkable beauty, kindness and love of classical Persian poetry won her
many admirers among her peers and teachers at the state hospitals where she
studied. In 1963, she became a State Registered Nurse (SRN) as well as a State
Registered Midwife.

Beginning in 1964, Mimi started working as a private nurse and midwife in
London. She helped many young mothers give birth to their babies. Some of
them stayed in lifelong contact with her. In London, she also wrote two volumes of
Persian poetry. A few of these were published in several Iranian literary reviews.
Upon returning to Iran in 1965, she was appointed Senior Health Inspector at Iran’s
Health Ministry. In this capacity, she helped improve nursing care standards and
midwifery facilities in rural areas.

In 1965, she married Dr. Mohamad Oliai, a noted Iranian surgeon and Deputy
Labor Minister, who played a crucial role in modernizing Iran’s healthcare system.
Mimi raised her two sons at home whilst studying for her master’s degree in
nursing and public health at the American-founded University of Health Sciences
in Tehran where she also completed the bulk of her doctoral work. Her Iranian MA
thesis bore on the incidence of in-hospital infections. It was published as a separate
book in 1983 and remains a major academic resource for health care professionals
today in Iran.

In 1984, she accompanied her two sons to the United Stated where the family
resettled. Mimi started working as Clinical Nurse Specialist in Chicago and later in
Denver while supporting her two sons, Simon and Fred. An avid reader, culinary
and sketch artist, she travelled the world before starting to write her autobiography
in 2018. In an essay published in 2022, she noted that her life story

“serves to unite me with future readers in the common desire to adopt a mentally
liberating distance from history and its symbolic actors.”

Her poetic conception of freedom from the injustices that beset man’s finite
existence is perhaps best encapsulated by this celebrated passage from Omar
Khayam’s Rubaiyat:

“And if the Wine you drink, the Lip
you press, End in what All begins and
ends in—Yes; Think then you are today what
Yesterday You were—Tomorrow you
shall not be less.”

Mimi is survived by her two sons, Simon and Fred, and her two grandsons Erik &
Wyatt.

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