There are artists who entertain, and then there are artists who rescue you. Marjane Satrapi was the second kind.

She picked up a pen and drew what so many of us could not put into words — the vertigo of living between worlds, the grief of a homeland that both shaped and expelled you, the strange loneliness of being a girl who thinks too much in a world that demands too little. She drew it in black and white, because that is how it felt: stark, unambiguous, and at the same time full of shadow.

She spent decades using art and storytelling to challenge the stereotypes about Iran and to give a face and a voice to ordinary people living under political restrictions. But for those of us who lived some version of her story — the displacement, the revolution, the exile, the reinvention — she did something even more personal. She made us feel seen. Not as a statistic, not as a refugee, not as a political symbol. As a person. As a child who loved Iron Maiden and also loved her grandmother. As someone who was both too Iranian for Europe and too free for Iran.

She taught us that the most radical act can be an honest memoir. That a girl’s coming-of-age story, told truthfully, can crack open the world’s understanding of an entire people.

She was born in Iran in 1969, and her parents were active against the monarchy of the Shah — something that would come to inform all of her work. She carried that inheritance with grace and fury, with humor dark enough to be Iranian and bright enough to be universal.

And now she is gone — at only 56, in Paris, the city she made her home — having outlived her husband by barely a year, her heart apparently unable to carry the weight of that loss. There is something terribly Marjane about that. She never did anything halfway.

To those of us for whom her story was also our story: we are allowed to grieve deeply today. She was a mirror. She was a map. She was proof that our complicated lives were worth telling, worth drawing, worth the whole world’s attention.

Rest now, Marjane. You gave us everything.