Fairy Tale Endings

Hello, High Plains! I’m Marjory Hall with a BookByte for the Radio Reader’s Series. At first glance, the title Everything Sad Is Untrue might strike one as a bit of clichéd wishful thinking. The more I think about it, though, the more it seems right in line with all I know about fairy tales. There is something about fairy tales that lingers on after the telling. Daniel Nayeri loosely frames the chronicle of his childhood on the construct of the famous Arabian Nights, and that structure is satisfying on many levels. The protagonist’s only hope for survival is telling such fascinating stories that his listeners do not wish to do without them.

Young Daniel’s quest for connection parallels that of Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights. For the young bride, telling her royal husband stories is the only way in which she can make him learn to see her as an individual instead of merely another in a line of women forced to pay the price of one woman’s betrayal. The various tales, spun over 1,001 nights, feature all sorts of human circumstances. They allow King Shahryar and Scheherazade to share a vast range of experiences. Though it might be possible to sentence a near-stranger to death after one night of marriage, the King has too much invested in his newest wife to miss out on another and another and yet another night listening to her. It is this bond of shared experience that Daniel hopes to forge with his American schoolmates.

Just as Scheherazade is not just another bride to be dispatched, Daniel is more than just another faceless refugee. He knows that there is more in him than his present status of poor immigrant conveys. With the same patience and wisdom demonstrated by Scheherazade, Daniel persists in his efforts to connect meaningfully with the other children despite their misunderstandings about his home country, his culture, and his family. Do Scheherazade and Daniel really find fairy tale-style happy endings? Well, that’s the thing about fairy tales.

Isn’t one important element of the fairy tale the fact that nobody thinks of them as “true,” even though the most magical settings contain some element of human reality, whether that be jealousy, fear, courage, or love? An important part of participating in fairy tales is the mutual agreement to play along with that fantasy in pursuit of a happy ending. In Daniel’s storyland, the wife of a governor falls in love with the humble librarian. Tamar’s wedding pastry is imbued with the hopeless love of Abbas, the humble baker, and Daniel’s many-times-great-grandfather gains a fortune as reward for healing a pasha’s daughter. The narrator foresees his own happy ending, even though he predicts that it might take a thousand years to come. Our preference for happy endings is why people like fairy tales, and that is also why many contemporary interpretations of those stories redact the more sad or violent portions. If everyone agrees that the hero’s fate of never-ending happiness is not strictly true, aren’t there grounds for arguing that the sad parts of a fairy tale might be similarly untrue? Does that change how we experience the story?

The first words of Everything Sad Is Untrue remind us that a story need not be factual to affect readers. The poets who tell fairy tales are not lying; they are people “trying to remember their dreams,” like the dreams of a boy suddenly removed from his idyllic home, like a refugee trying to cling to his dream of a happy new life while he is struggling through the sad parts of the story. Like dreams, fairy tales present human truth but allow the reader the consolation of knowing that, just as the blissful parts of the story are untrue, so are the sad parts of that story. All stories lead somewhere else. The destination does not depend on the events of the journey; it depends on the direction of travel.

I’m Marjory Hall for the Radio Readers Series.