The son of a bookkeeper, Mahyar grew up in his home country of Iran surrounded by literature. Every night his father returned from his job at the publishing house with a new book in hand, filling Amouzegar’s childhood home with a panoply of works from established and up-and-coming writers. Then at age fourteen, Amouzegar left Tehran to live with his older sisters in California. The year was 1978. Delayed by the political unrest that would soon lead to the Iranian Revolution, his parents were unable to follow him to the United States for over five years. A hemisphere away from his mother and father, Amouzegar came of age in San Francisco. Entering adulthood, he found himself balancing a promising career as a national security analyst with his boyhood love of literature.