S. Mostofi was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. After the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty, the Islamic regime prohibited her father, an executive at one of the major banks in Tehran, from traveling for fifteen years and stripped her family of their wealth and position. Meanwhile, many of her relatives escaped or were executed for trivial reasons.
The first in her family to immigrate to the United States, S. Mostofi came to America in the 1990s at the age of sixteen. She wrote the first draft of Cemetery of Dreams when she was fourteen years old in Iran. In 2004 she returned to it, eventually rewriting and revising it.