Everything Sad Is Untrue

“When I tell this whole story, I don’t tell anyone about that part. I was just a little kid back then. Still. They’ll think I want their pity. 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.”

Daniel struggles with feeling “worthy” throughout the novel, hitting a point near its end where he feels that he has wasted his readers’ time. He wants to feel a connection and wants so badly to be valued and loved. Eventually, he learns that it isn’t his fault that the bull is dead, as he believes in this story, and, to some extent, that relieves him of some pain.

“If we can just rise to the challenge of communication—here in the parlor of your mind—we can maybe reach across time and space and every ordinary thing to see so deep into the heart of each other that you might agree that I am like you.”

Daniel wishes so badly to connect with his reader, Mrs. Miller–and the audience by extension–that he weaves stories like Scheherazade, wishing to show that he is not so different, that he experiences the whole range of emotions and that he has had a difficult life. This sums up his purpose and relates to the theme of the experience of immigrant children and attempts to connect. Each day, he encounters his peers, many of whom want nothing to do with him (at best) or to tease and bully him (at worst). Stories, he hopes, can be a way of showing that he is just a kid, like them, just a person.

“The truth is that’s why I’m writing all this. Behind me is the elemental fiend of my memories crumbling into powder. I watch an arm disintegrate and instantly forget what was there.”

Daniel is terrified of losing his memories of Iran, especially since he was so small when he first left Iran. He fears losing the connection to his home, and so stories become a way of connecting back to that home for him.

“A patchwork memory is the shame of a refugee.”

Daniel does not perfectly remember his life before, and his memories of Iran and his family there are not as solid as they once were. He is afraid of losing his heritage entirely, especially now that his name has been changed to Daniel. It feels like the life of Khosrou in Iran is separate from that of Daniel in Oklahoma. As a result, this phrase becomes a refrain throughout the novel.

“In the mind of Scheherazade there are a thousand times a thousand times a thousand tales. She tells them forever without stopping. Even this is one of them. But lunchtime has overtaken me and I cannot finish my report on what I did this summer.”

Like Scheherazade, Daniel never tells a story all the way through before shifting to another. He later returns and finishes it, but he wishes to keep his reader, Mrs. Miller, and the audience invested in the story, so they will return to hear its end. He thinks that, otherwise, we would not keep listening to him.

“The answer is that now you know two true things. One, every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive. And two, the story of Aziz could have gone a million different ways.”

Daniel seeks to stay alive, and his stories are a way for him to keep his past alive as well. Every story has many different versions, and, likewise with Aziz, there were infinite possibilities of what her life would be like. For Daniel, this is still true. The possibility of a better future is one that keeps him going and it is one that keeps his mother–who Daniel sees as the hero of the story–going as well.

“Reader, you are the king, so let me tell you, when Aziz married Hassan, the two were already in love and one of them was already destined to die.”

The reader within this story plays a huge role in Daniel’s imagination. To him, readers are the king who decides whether Scheherazade will live or die each morning. He wishes the reader to be enraptured by his stories, never quite finishing one before moving onto the next, returning only a time later so that he keeps our attention, just as in this instance, in which he is about switch between the story of Aziz back to another.

“I want to stay in love with her until she realizes I am a person. It is a complicated thing that a little kid, or even a fifth grader, can’t understand, that we are always choosing situations that hurt us.”

One of the lessons of Daniel’s narrative is the balance attempting to be struck between showing white Americans his humanity without sacrificing himself in the process. Kelly J., who Daniel has a crush on and about whom he is writing here, has no interest in him, but he desperately wants her approval. He knows that it will only end up in hurt, but he maintains the desire to connect with her anyway.

“Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble.”

Everyone in Daniel’s family has had to be brave, to make it through terrible circumstances repeatedly. This quote emphasizes the theme of hope and anticipation in trying times because they all hope for a better future. They all believe that things can and will be better eventually.

“These are the parts of the conversation that feel like a video game. He’s jumping around the topic—religion bad, ruined his life—and throwing a billion fireballs—Why do governments tell people what they can believe? Why would she take his children?—and all the while, the giant lizard on the screen he’s trying to avoid is my one question: Why didn’t you come with us?”

Daniel’s father elected to stay behind when they fled Iran, and he later divorced Sima, Daniel’s mother. For Daniel, it feels as though part of him was left behind with his father. Before he came to visit, he had not seen his father in person in six years, and he still doesn’t really know why his father stayed.

“The thing is that Scheherazade was telling her stories to a king in the language they both spoke as babies. So she never had to explain the demons who believe in God, or what was rude. She just showed it in the story. But the shame of refugees is that we have to constantly explain ourselves. It makes the stories patchworks, not beautiful rugs.”

Daniel is periodically ashamed by the loss of his memories and of his feeling of incompleteness that accompanies being a refugee in his mind. He must explain every detail to his readers, which make stories feel more stunted and piecemeal than a comprehensive narrative. It makes it more difficult to connect and for his listeners to see the beauty in the stories, which is often what happens when he attempts to recount them to his classmates.

“The legend of my mom is that she can’t be stopped. Not when you hit her. Not when a whole country full of goons puts her in a cage. Not even if you make her poor and try to kill her slowly in the little-by-little poison of sadness.”

Sima is the hero of Daniel’s narrative. She persists no matter what and brings her children to a new country and attempts to carve out a life for them, no matter the sacrifice that she must make, and they recognize it. Daniel’s description illustrates how he and his sister want her to feel healthy and safe, which foreshadows Daniel’s sister standing up to Ray and their decision to leave at the end of the novel.

“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 love 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?”

Daniel wishes so fervently for readers to respect him as a person, and he also wants them to get to know him. He wants them to recognize the struggles that he has endured and to therefore offer him kindness in return.

“Mrs. Miller says I have ‘lost the plot,’ and am now just making lists of things that happened to fill space. But I replied that she is beholden to a Western mode of storytelling that I do not accept and that the 1,001 Nights are basically Scheherazade stalling for time, so I don’t see the difference.”

Daniel’s clever retort to Mrs. Miller in this quote iterates the ways in which this story draws from its rich literary tradition to prove a point about his goal. He takes on this tradition as his example, even if it seems like an unusual mode of storytelling that the reader may not be used to.

“The point of the Nights is that if you spend time with each other—if we really listen in the parlors of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen—then we would fall in love. We would marvel at how beautifully we were made. We would never think to be villain kings, and we would never kill each other. Just the opposite. The stories aren’t the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love.”

This quote emphasizes that it isn’t just stories that connect people. It is also the time spent getting to know one another. This quality time is key, and it is the way in which one comes to feel affection for another, one that transcends any difference.

“But you have to erase 660 pages every day, and get a callus on your finger that won’t go away for the rest of your life. You can’t stop for rest. You can’t waste time with dignity.”

When Sima puts her children in a home school in Italy, the family hosting the school only allows them to work on their old workbooks in their home. Each day, Sima must erase them, even though Dina and Daniel are treated terribly by the other children and that it is unfair that these workbooks–which they will never use again–would otherwise be trash. Sima persists and tries to make the best for her children out of the situation, highlighting her persistence that Daniel holds in high regard.

“My mom is the unstoppable force. The power beam you get when you hit level-99 in Final Fantasy and learn the Ultima spell that goes through the crust of the planet like it’s the crust of a pie. My dad is the immovable object.”

Daniel’s parents are so different from one another, and this is evident from the start of the novel. He sums it up quickly here, showing that they were incompatible because of it. He also returns frequently to the fact that his mother is unstoppable, making her the hero of their story.

“It was so quick, becoming a family again. We hadn’t even reached the baggage claim and he had his arm around me, needling my sister with his embarrassing behavior. It was so quick that he became human to me again, in the real world of Oklahoma, where you could buy cinnamon rolls at a stand in the airport.”

Daniel naturally feels disconnected from his father, having had to live thousands of miles away, and so he is relieved to be with him again when he comes to visit in Oklahoma. However, he also feels a contrast between the father of his memories, who is larger than life, and the one that he sees in person.

“Maybe you’ve gone and the only eyes are the ones who flipped to this page accidentally. Or you’ve skipped ahead from someplace in the beginning and missed all the parts that explain me to you—from there to here. Maybe I’m the patchwork text. Maybe I deserve to be hit all the time. Maybe I’m a liar. Maybe I don’t deserve a welcome. And maybe I never had anything good. Maybe even this. I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

Daniel struggles with feeling insufficient throughout the novel. He feels the shame of an incomplete memory, and at this point in the novel, he feels like he doesn’t deserve his readers’ attention anymore. It is the closest he comes to giving up in telling his story. He feels most ready to give up, thinking that things will never improve between him and his classmates.

“I thought about the long year and everything she’d done for me. How she had always known which to be—a teacher who speaks or a teacher who listens—and I said, ‘Thank you, Mrs. Miller.’”

Periodically, Daniel mentions different assignments as he tells his story and there are notes of Mrs. Miller suggesting something like he went too far afield from the assignment prompt, but he is also grateful that she, the intended reader of this book, has continued to listen to him, to hear his story and to witness what he has to say. Her impact provides a brief source of comfort that is sparse between Daniel’s feelings of ostracism and isolation within his school.

“I guess that was my dad’s favorite myth, that he was everything to everybody.”

Daniel’s family is far from perfect. He interacts with his sister very little, and he misses his father dearly, wanting him to have come with them to the United States. However, the fact of the matter is that his father stayed, and while he knows that his father wants to be loved, he also knows that he isn’t perfect. He doesn’t let him see this, though, and Daniel lets him feel like a mythic figure who appears and gives cash to kids at a water park so that they will get things for him from the concession stand at White Water Rapids.

“But that was the moment I realized that myths are just legends that everybody agrees on, and legends are just stories that got bigger over time. The story of my dad—who for one day became the king of White Water Rapids—was just another myth in the making. The way everyday concerns didn’t bother him, the rules he followed that weren’t the normal rules for heroes, all of that—made him interesting. He was the god who spoke and spoke and spoke, and you never got tired of it.”

Despite his father’s flaws, Daniel loves him and is grateful for what he was able to do for him before his class on the last day of school. He made the class realize that Daniel’s stories of his father are important and true, and Daniel didn’t make them up. Additionally, spending time with Massoud also showed the class Daniel’s own humanity because of his charismatic personality.

“The anticipation that the God who listens in love will one day speak justice. The hope that some final fantasy will come to pass that will make everything sad untrue.”

This quote is not only the line from which the novel takes its title; it is also directly connected to the theme of hope and anticipation in trying times. Daniel’s mom continues to push through for this hope, and so does Daniel.