Myths, Legends and Rural Oklahoma: Five Questions for Daniel Nayeri, Author of Everything Sad Is Untrue: (a true story)

Everything Sad Is Untrue is mesmerizing, hilarious, inspiring and heartbreaking — and it’s all based on your own incredible journey. What pushed you to write this story? 
I think if you’ve had such an odd childhood, you grow up with the idea that you’re responsible for explaining it somehow to others. When I was a kid, I would go to a friend’s house to play soccer or something, and as any good Oklahoma parent would do, their mom would ask a little about me. Those were my first experiences with storytelling. I would stand on their porch trying to condense the entire history of Iran in order to explain how we ended up as refugees. You can imagine, the motivation to go play created an extremely efficient storyteller.
Similarly, the narrator in this book is obsessed with explaining himself, even to the point of explaining how he came to know everything he’s telling you, as he’s telling it. I think that was born out of all those porch-side explanations I gave to all those parents.
But ultimately, what pushed me to write this story is that I’ve always felt I had an extraordinary mother. I wanted others to appreciate what she did for us, how much she sacrificed, and the incredible strength it takes as a parent to experience a great deal of pain, but not pass it down to your children. To break these horrible cycles in a family is an act of heroism that I wanted to share.
Reading this story was a wild ride! It’s quite unlike anything we’ve ever read. Jumping from tales of ancient Persia to school bus rides and middle school hijinks. It’s epic and personal at the same time. What compelled you to tackle your story this way?    
I wanted it to feel as much like a kid talking to you as possible. Obviously, he’s a well-read kid, with sometimes elevated language. But the tone and structure, I wanted both to feel as though you’d just met this boy, and for some reason, he’s latched onto you the way he has to his teacher, and he’s decided to tell you his whole life story. I’ve had that happen to me a few times as an adult, on a soccer field or a train station. I’ll be sitting there, and a young person will be skittish at first, then strike up a conversation, and before you know it, they’re talking nonstop and telling you every thought they ever had. Usually, those experiences end with their parent, who’s sitting beside them, telling them they need to quiet down. But it’s a beautiful impulse in kids. When they realize you’re a safe person to talk to, they want to share. And in kids who have experienced a lack of safe adults, it’s an even more pronounced effect. They often find teachers or counselors and pour their hearts out. I wanted the narrator of this story to be pouring his heart out to the reader, without chapter breaks, without the trappings of an overly constructed plot. He’s simply baring his soul to a stranger. It’s a somewhat sad, but deeply beautiful impulse in a child.
Every family and culture have their own oral history, their own folklore. What drew you to the particular tales and legends told in Everything Sad Is Untrue?  
There’s a line in the book that says the boundary between legends and history is nothing but ten feet of fog. This is true of all histories. If you go back far enough, the accounts of kings and trade routes start to morph into demigods and invisible cities.
I wanted to explore that space where the verifiable memories start to morph into the founding myths that we tell ourselves, especially within a family. Every family has these. For us, they were the vague stories around my great grandfather’s disappearance in a saffron field on my mom’s side, and the origin story of how my father’s side purchased all their farmland — which involved one of his ancestor’s curing a princess and winning his weight in gold. This was the story of how we got the land. I can verify that the land exists, but the story, well, that’s somewhere in that ten feet of fog.
Did you write this book for a particular audience? What do you hope readers take away from this story?  
I love books that straddle lots of age groups and genres. There’s a category of books that Barnes & Noble introduced me to with the Discover Program back in the day. I don’t think I was the audience for Life of Pi, but they selected it, and suddenly this adult novel with a young protagonist felt like a category of its own. The Kite Runner, The Book Thief, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Swamplandia! all inhabited that same space in my head. And of course, there are lots of other examples. I’d love it if the audience for my book was able to be young readers and adults at the same time. Of course, you can never trust an author to tell you their audience. The answer is always, “Everyone.”
We love to ask: What are you reading and recommending right now?   
I think The Golden Age by Roxanne Moreil and Cyril Pedrosa is the most beautiful graphic novel I read this year (maybe any year). I’ve been looking at a lot of middle-grade novels from eras past these days. I just finished The King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry, about the history of the Godolphin Arabian, a legendary horse that sired a lot of famous racehorses. I’m at the end of The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli, about a boy traveling across Medieval England with a monk and minstrel. I’m just starting The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Spear and Blood Red Horse by K.M. Grant. You might notice they’re all historical middle-grade novels. I’m doing some research as well as pleasure reading.