What does it mean to belong? For Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter who was imprisoned in Iran for 544 days on spurious charges of espionage, that question is complicated. Rezaian, an Iranian-American, holds the record for longest imprisonment of a Western journalist by Iran. He explores this dichotomy of love for a country and shame for its actions — particularly after his arrest and imprisonment — in his new memoir, Prisoner.

He was born in the United States to an Iranian father and a white Midwestern mother. Like many kids in the Iranian diaspora, he became used to straddling two warring cultural identities, particularly growing up in the 1970s and ’80s. At the time, there was an increasingly fractious relationship between the U.S. and Iran — one that was exacerbated by the 1979 hostage crisis.

“I’ve always felt that you can be an American of any kind of background, and that’s going to be more or less supported by the American masses,” Rezaian told me. “I don’t think the same is true of a hyphenated Iranian. I think that the people of Iran that I encountered on a daily basis in all the years that I lived there accepted me as somehow Iranian … but somehow not.”

Prisoner is a harrowing, dark and surprisingly funny read. He and his wife, journalist Yeganeh Salehi, were arrested in 2014, not long after they appeared on Anthony Bourdain’s CNN show, “Parts Unknown.” Armed security agents of the Iranian regime collared Rezaian in the parking garage of his Tehran apartment and arrested him and Salehi. (In another revealing moment emphasizing a sense of placelessness, he admits that his Farsi wasn’t quite good enough to understand when his captor told him he was being arrested.)

Here, the couple’s stories diverge. Rezaian was transferred to the notorious Evin prison, separated from his wife. His imprisonment began with 49 days of solitary confinement, which he describes as a “living grave,” and after a closed-door trial, culminated several hundred days later in a dramatic U.S.-led diplomatic effort to release them.

The lingering sense of shame and love for the Iran he depicts — even after his imprisonment — resonated with me deeply. I’m British-Iranian, and living with that dual identity can frequently be uncomfortable, particularly when the Islamic Republic transgresses. In Prisoner, Rezaian tells a story that perfectly encapsulates this: His father, a rug salesman in San Francisco, gave a $1,000 rug to each of the freed U.S. Embassy hostages, with a certificate that essentially said, “As an American, I welcome you home — and as an Iranian, I’m so sorry for all that you endured in my home country.”