Stories Get Better As They Get More True

A review of Everything Sad is Untrue

I’ve been hearing about Daniel' Nayeri’s book Everything Sad Is Untrue since it came out a few years ago. Many of my friends read it, rated it highly, and recommended it. People kept listing it as their favorite read of the year, the glowing reviews kept popping up in my feed, and I became more and more curious. What was this book with the Tolkien quote for a title, and would I like it as much as everyone else seemed to? The answer, it turns out, is yes.

Everything Sad Is Untrue tells the story of the 12-year-old Khosrou and his family, and how he and his sister and his mother became poor immigrants to Oklahoma from their wealthy life in Persia. His story is woven together like the beautiful Persian rugs that decorated his life back in Iran. Threads pop up here and there, sometimes dropped for a while until they appear again, forming a mesmerizing pattern that becomes even more beautiful when you step back at the end and look at the whole thing at once.

Because of the way the story is woven together it almost defies being talked about. A linear summary of the plot would hardly do it justice, and indeed would spoil some of the joy of uncovering the plot bit by bit through Khosrou’s jumbled narrative. It is a memory novel; Khosrou is trying to hold onto as many of the jumbled memories of his former life and family as he can before they disappear into an inaccessible past. He tells his story to his classmates, and like his hero Scheherazade, he does so to save his life.

For a book whose title claims that everything sad is untrue, the novel is full of desperately sad moments. Khosrou loses his childhood home, his grandparents, his father, his name (he is renamed Daniel so that the Americans can pronounce it), even many of his memories. In return he gets poverty, bullying, abuse, mockery. “Here is something I would like to tell you—stories get better as they get more true,” he says. And yet he says it in the middle of a tragic story of a broken heart (and a love letter written in cream puffs) that doesn’t get a happy ending. “In America they distrust unhappy people. But I don’t want pity. I just wonder if they’ve had that feeling too. The one where you realize it’s your fault that something beautiful is dead. And you know you weren’t worth the trouble.”

And yet this novel does something remarkable with all this sadness. It frankly acknowledges it and depicts it, from the eyes of a young child still trying to make sense of his own life and how much of it he bears responsibility for. And it also mixes it with a fair amount of humor, light-heartedness, and love, so that it doesn’t bog you down in pity. And in the end you get a reason for the sadness, a reason worth everything he experienced, a hero who never stops, and if you read carefully, the first hints of everything sad being untrue. This book is labeled as Young Adult, and yet the themes here are heavy and weighty and profound. The only book that comes to my mind to compare it with is The Book Thief, although on the surface they are nothing alike. But I would wager a guess that anyone who loved The Book Thief will also love this book.

“Memories are just stories we tell ourselves.” But the stories we tell ourselves make us into who we are. Memories, myths, and the present day are all wrapped together tightly in the narrative, and they give meaning to Khosrou’s life. A little over halfway through the book he tells us why he shares them with us. “Dear reader, you have to understand the point of all these stories. What they add up to. Scheherazade was trying to make the king human again. She made him one life by showing him all of it, the funny parts about poop, the dangerous parts with demons, even the boring parts about what makes marriages last. Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others. He became less immune, less numb, because of the stories. And what about you?”

Dear reader, I hope you will pick up this book and read it too. It has funny parts about poop (it is, after all, narrated by a 12 year old boy, but I assure you that I, a grown adult woman, found them funny too), it has dangerous parts and demons, but it is anything but boring. You will fall in love with the characters and be swept up in the great tapestry laid out in front of you. When it’s over, it just might take your breath away.