The purpose of this presentation will be to examine memoirs written by second-generation Iranian-Americans who travel to Iran, where their preconceived notions of the country collide with social and political realities that shape their daily lives there in unexpected ways. In travel memoirs such as Lipstick Jihad and Honeymoon in Tehran by Azadeh Moaveni, Saffron Sky by Gelareh Asayesh and To See and See Again themes such as self versus other, and the relationship between place, language and identity are complicated by the authors’ hybridized sense of self. These travelers have unique and often uniquely problematic motives for traveling to Iran and chronicling their journeys in the form of travel narratives. The second-generation traveler carries with her expectations of the other which initially seem opposite the expectations held by a travel memoirist whose identity is in no way rooted in the destination(s) of her travels. Often, the second-generation memoirist travels to her “home” country with the expectation that the identity of the other will more closely resemble what she perceives as her authentic cultural identity than that of the inhabitants of her adopted country, the U.S.. Thus, any perceived gaps between the memoirist’s identity and that of the (non) other pose a threat to her sense of self. She must therefore bridge these gaps by either ignoring aspects of the culture which contribute to her feelings of alienation from Iran or by further othering those who do not support a paradigm in which her authentic identity and what she desires to be the cultural identity of her home country are one. Further, the readers’ conscious or unconscious expectations of authenticity in travel narratives written by second-generation memoirists also complicate the depiction of otherness in these memoirs. A tension exists between the readers’ expectations of authenticity from the second-generation memoirist and the writer’s enhanced subjectivity as a result of her hybridized identity. Contrary to the author’s intentions and the readers’ expectations, this subjectivity often hinders the creation of narratives which debunk potentially harmful myths about the character of a place and its people.