I’m Whitney Hodgin, from the Historic Cimarron Hotel, for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club. The reader is in for a WILD RIDE starting on the COVER of this memoir titled Everything Sad is Untrue: A True Story.
Daniel Nayeri, whose actual, Persian first name is “not for your mouth” wastes no time in guaranteeing his story must be a happy one. If it is a true story, and everything sad is untrue, then Nayeri’s tale must, at least, not be sad one.
What a relief! I didn’t want to read a sad story of a six-year-old immigrant’s experience moving to Oklahoma, USA. And Nayeri knew that. In fact, I reckon he knew he was facing an uphill challenge trying to make his story appeal to most American audiences – for he is the “other.”
This book very deftly undermines that universal tendency to orient oneself according to: “us” or “them, “we” vs “they” ---stinking thinking for sure.
“That would never happen to us” one might be tempted to say when witnessing the dissolution of a family across continents.
“WE know better than THAT.”
“THEY cause trouble WE don’t.”
“THEY deserve what they get. WE will stay out of it.”
So humble is our narrator’s heart, having reluctantly journeyed through the strife of the “other from Iran” ----- and so clever are his stories. He puts the reader in much the same position as the king in 1,001 Arabian Nights --- free to judge, but ultimately closer to humanity and further from bigotry than before we clapped eyes on his book.
In that way, Nayeri is a sherpa guiding us away from the isolation of exceptionalism. with short stories that connect us to a place of common ground, a place of empathy where “YOU” and “I” are of the same species.
The American reader roots for Daniel. We want to win with him. We want him to feel like one of us. Daniel’s father speaks of this poetical sentiment to his son. “The thing that turns the lion into a little fox is need,” he tells him.
Our narrator wants to connect the disconnected. Daniel needs a friend. And that’s what Daniel shows and tells with his book, revealing his life as if “putting a jigsaw puzzle into a tumble dryer and having it come out with all the pieces in the right place.”
For me, the miracle is how “a patchwork of stories - the shame of a refugee” connected me with the foreign-born author. Daniel is a 12-year-old refugee from the land of stories and genies” who lives in the land of concrete and weathermen – Oklahoma.”
He writes with the wisdom of a survivor who knows everything about how to effectively communicate with “us Americans,” those of us who are far too comfortable to embrace challenges willingly, especially the challenge of dissolving the “us vs. them” bigot’s mentality.
“I’m not going to introduce myself,” he promises. “You will know me by my voice.”
