How's this for the mother of all identity crises: The son of a charismatic-but-absent Iranian father and deserted, heartbroken Jewish mother spends his childhood lost in empty promises of revolutionary rhetoric and grows up to design labels for the high priestess of bourgeois values, Martha Stewart.

That's just a bit of the infrastructure supporting Said Sayrafiezadeh's fascinating, maddening and, at times, comic memoir, "When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir of a Political Childhood" (The Dial Press), about growing up in the Socialist Workers Party in Pittsburgh during the death throes of the steel industry and the ascent of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

The childhood portrayed here brims with so many opposing loyalties and deep ironies, the boy in question could easily have gone bonkers. Or become a writer. Or both. But in his remembrances, Sayrafiezadeh (pronounced Say-RAH-fee-ZAH-day) comes across as eminently sane, good-humored and remarkably in touch with the forces that shaped and conflicted him.

His parents, Martha Harris, a frustrated writer, and Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh, a mathematics professor, were true believers whose immersion in the Socialist Workers Party drowned out everything else. When Said was 9 months old, his dad abandoned them to pursue the revolution. His older brother and sister were shipped off to live elsewhere, and in 1975, when Said was 7, his mother moved with him to Pittsburgh.

The relocation came at the suggestion of her brother, who taught at the University of Pittsburgh. The brother was Mark Harris (they used to be Mark and Martha Finkelstein), author of "Bang the Drum Slowly" and a raft of other novels. Mark Harris lived in a large, well-appointed home on Northumberland Street in Squirrel Hill that was a mansion to the young Said.

Martha Harris got a job as secretary to the dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University (her boss was Akram Midani). She insisted on residing in a series of depressing, threadbare apartments, the better to suffer as workers suffered under capitalism.

"The difference between us and the other poor families in this neighborhood was that our poverty was intentional and self-inflicted," Sayrafiezadeh writes. "It was all artifice ... my mother actively, consciously chose not only for us to be poor but for us to remain poor ... there was nothing more ignominious than to succeed in a society that was as morally bankrupt as ours."

Meanwhile, his father was enjoying life, hooking up with younger women, making speeches all over the country, basking in the adoration of spellbound crowds -- and all but ignoring the son in Pittsburgh who slept with a picture of this stranger, his dad, above his bed.

Mother and son ate simple meals, went to meetings and demonstrations, sold copies of the party newspaper, The Militant, and interacted almost exclusively with SWP comrades.

The boy struggled to make friends in school, having little in common with his classmates. He developed a conflicted relationship with material goods, wanting and despising them. The title refers to his mother's refusal to buy him an inexpensive skateboard because after the revolution, such things will be free to the masses.

Then came the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the taking of American hostages from the U.S. Embassy. While Said's classmates were shouting "Bomb Iran" and worse, Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh was back in his homeland trying to establish the Iranian workers' paradise. At one point in school, Said blurts out the party line denouncing the hostages as spies and winds up completely ostracized.

At its core, this story is one of waiting and longing. Waiting for the new social order that his parents promised was coming any day, for his sad mother to trudge home from her job and meetings, for his distant father to throw him a crumb of recognition; longing for the grapes that were forbidden during the United Farm Workers boycott, for a few of the comforts enjoyed by the "rich asses," as his mother called them, for a place to fit in. (He eventually did find friends with whom he's close to this day.)

After returning to New York in 1993 to write and act, Sayrafiezadeh held several graphic design jobs, the last being with Martha Stewart from 1998 to 2006 -- the perfect place to make up for decades of anti-materialist indoctrination. The work, he writes, was boring, mindless and repetitive, "but it is a supreme pleasure to immerse myself daily in lush fantasies ... surrounded by pretty young women and the smell of cake baking in the test kitchen."

Today, at 40, he writes pieces for magazines and literary journals as well as plays that have been produced by several theater companies. He lives with his wife, Karen (his girlfriend in the book), in a co-op on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

His mother abruptly quit the SWP after 20 years. She retired from her job at Carnegie Mellon after three decades and still lives in Pittsburgh, where she has attended Quaker meetings for the past six years. His father, 74, lives in Brooklyn and is a professor of math at Medgar Evers College. He remains a leading member of the party.

Sayrafiezadeh said he sent his mom the book, having no idea how she'd take it. Reached at her Shadyside apartment, Martha Harris teared up when asked.

"I feel it's magnificent," she said. "Very truthful, no exaggerations. He did seem a little angry, but in a tempered way and with humor. I don't feel excoriated. He was saying the way our lives were. I'm very proud of him."

His father, on the other hand, has not spoken to him since 2005, when a version of the dinner scene from the memoir was first published in Granta magazine.

"I don't know if he read it, but people in the Socialist Workers Party did," Sayrafiezadeh said. "They wrote to me saying, 'How dare you, your father was a wonderful man, he didn't abandon you.' Then I realized they thought I was my brother, which proves my point. They didn't even know I existed.

"I may send him the book at some point," he continued. "He wouldn't be happy about my portrayal of the party, but his allegiance to them has always been more important than his relationship with me.

"I needed him when I was a kid. I don't need him now as an adult. I'm used to his silence and his absence."

What's heartbreaking, he said, is that he still loves his dad.

"He's a charming man, and he can be fun to be around," the author said. "Even though there are layers inside me that are bitter and angry, it's not my overwhelming feeling now. Writing the book helped with that, and the fact that I'm in therapy. I tried to push some of those bad feelings aside. ... I wanted an honest portrait of how I felt at the time, and let people decide for themselves."

Some conflicts remain close to the surface.

"I still struggle with some of the deprivation, giving myself things," he said. "I was in Whole Foods not that long ago, and there were some grapes that were really expensive. I wasn't going to get them, and then I thought, 'I can afford this. I've gotta buy these grapes, I've gotta eat these grapes.' And I did."