This year, RBC is running a series of articles in the Beacon examining books that might be especially helpful to the life of the Church. We hope you will benefit from these book descriptions and suggestions.
Everything Sad Is Untrue
by Daniel Nayeri
During the spring of 2018, I was a student at Rosedale Bible College studying Creative Writing under Vicki Sairs. The previous year, I took Vicki’s composition course where she helped me straighten out my misplaced commas and graciously informed me about MLA formatting. Now we were moving from writing as a science to writing as an art.
“Show, don’t tell” was the mantra, and I have kept it as my framework for writing and reading. I do not know if I ever succeeded, but Khosrou Nayeri, or “Daniel” as he now goes by, does so beautifully in his memoir Everything Sad is Untrue.
Born in Iran, Nayeri, along with his sister and mother, fled to Italy when he was six years old. The flight was due to the threat of persecution. After several years there, his family was sponsored* by a couple from the Midwest, and Nayeri began a new life in the States as an eight-year-old. He tells the stories of his school days, his early childhood, and memories of stories he’s been told. Bullying, Persian legends, middle school crushes, and the Iranian version of Mounds candy bars unfold an entertaining retelling of the life of a refugee kid set in metropolitan Oklahoma.
Geared toward adolescents, Nayeri isn’t short on mild bathroom humor, the self-consciousness of a changing body, and middle-grade comments like, “she was totally a finigonzon (beautiful girl).” Yet he never goes overboard, honestly sharing about life as a pre-teen boy.
While I listened to the author read his story on audio, I imagine this book would make a great family read-aloud with middle to high schoolers and likely bring up some talking points along the way!
I found Nayeri’s writing style to be relatable, yet not predictable. It reads like a down-to-earth conversation mixed with ancient Persian poetry metaphors. Sometimes his stories were so familiar I could feel them for myself, like the dynamics of a third-grade public school classroom. In other sections, I just had to keep listening to see where we would end up, like his retelling of A Thousand and One Nights.
I love a good memoir and have come a long way in learning how to appreciate a novel rather than endure it. At one time in my life, had Nayeri simply bullet-pointed his autobiographical facts, I would have thought I was just as satisfied with the condensed information. Nonfiction and all of its “telling” is one of my favorite ways to get information.
Story gives us a different perspective that flat information simply cannot.
Yet I would have missed how his writing style speaks another layer into his story. I have learned not only the value of showing a story but that “story”—or even fiction—isn’t somehow less spiritual or a waste of time. Story gives us a different perspective that flat information simply cannot. It stretches our worldview while giving us something tangible to hold onto. Everything Sad Is Untrue did this for me.
In the beginning chapters, Nayeri describes his elementary wishes to be seen as more than a refugee kid and it challenged me. “We can know and be known to each other, and then we’re not enemies anymore.” Knowing each other is necessary if we really believe in an “every tribe and tongue” kind of Kingdom. We can learn to know each other through “story.”
While Nayeri’s story includes Christian elements such as conversion that might encourage the believer, I see it additionally as a cultural bridge inviting the reader to a more full and perhaps uncomfortable view of God, each other, and ourselves.
Nayeri includes elements of personal doubt and stories of “Christians” who certainly don’t live up to the name. Twenty-first-century human migration is unsurprisingly (yet perhaps unfortunately) political with a variety of intentions. While his story might be more palatable to some–his family was fleeing persecution for being Christians–people are migrating all the time, everywhere, to our countries, often with reasons beyond their control. Persecution, war, and famine are major factors influencing migration.
Yet, regardless of our political preferences in the myriads of migration situations, I hope that we as believers will not see that conflict with our desire to learn from each other’s stories. Listening and learning are practices we can implement no matter how we feel about “policies.” Everything Sad Is Untrue is a great introduction to that practice.
*Sponsorship: Allows individuals, groups of individuals, or organizations to nominate specific refugees to enter and stay in their country. These programs are a tangible way for communities to directly support refugees.
“Private Sponsorship Pathways.” UNHCR US. Accessed August 19, 2024.
