An Interview with Daniel Nayeri

If you’ve been reading our website reviews over the last six months or so, you know we’ve been raving about Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story). We’ll have a little more to say about this book tomorrow—stay tuned! But after reading it, my curiosity about the author was stirred. No wonder that, because his book, though classified as fiction, is a memoir. In his author note, Daniel Nayeri reiterates that it’s all true, aside from name changes to protect the guilty and some minor time shifts.

He began writing the book after receiving word that his paternal grandfather in Iran had died. He was then in his twenties, a typical age (I’ve found) to start looking back on your past, short as it is. The teen years propel us away from the immediate family circle rather quickly, but once we’re far enough away to consider and reflect, family regains its importance. Nayeri begins his memoir with a striking memory of his grandfather slaughtering a bull with a slash to its throat, and soon after greeting his three-year-old grandson with loving, bloody hands. Much later, while Daniel is talking over the incident with his mother, she tells him he doesn’t remember it quite correctly. But memory has its own logic, and though the recall of a very young child may not be factual, something in it may nonetheless be true.

Daniel Nayeri fled Iran at the age of six with his mother and sister, after his mother had converted to Christianity. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, he explained why he’s never returned: “When I was 18 I had to declare my faith and I did not choose Islam. Muslim law, as interpreted in Iran, says if you convert to Judaism or Christianity, this is a capital crime. I wish this were not a hindrance to my traveling to Iran.”

I do, too. Iran, where he lived for his first six years, is still vivid and alive to him. But none of us can really go back. (Do you recall returning to the house you grew up in after you had been away for a few years? How everything seems so small?) Still, memory helps shape us into what we are, and Nayeri’s memories immerse us in a life, a culture, and a history that’s colorful, exotic, heartbreaking, and redemptive. Everything true becomes unsad.

It’s hard to establish contact with some authors, especially just after they’ve won a prestigious honor like the ALA’s Prinz Award for excellence in young-adult literature. But when I reached out to him on Facebook, Daniel Nayeri got back to me right away, and graciously answered a few questions.

You have an unusually rich life story. How would you encourage a 12-year-old to dig into his own family history?

I try to help young writers focus on specificity of details, story structure, and dialogue more than what I call the showy plot elements that made up my life. I ask them to look back on their family stories, and try to find the moments of inflection–the time a grandparent moved the whole family from one state to another, or a particularly long-held home over generations, or a person who became the keeper of traditions in the family or a breaker of them–these are all great places to start digging if they want to explore the themes that travel across members of the family. Stories like O.E. Rolvaag’s GIANTS IN THE EARTH, David James Duncan’s BROTHERS K, and Jane Smiley’s THOUSAND ACRES, on their face, are stories of fairly quiet lives, but they’re riveting in the telling.  

What are some ways parents can pass on a sense of family history to their children?

I have never attended a funeral that did not include someone saying, “I wish we’d sat down more and listened to their stories,” or if they were a particularly private person, “I wish we’d insisted more, for them to tell us.” I think it’s an obligation of the older generations to give those stories, and for the younger generations to receive them. In the end, the shared story is the only connective tissue they have with one another, and I wish we had a stronger cultural emphasis on helping families strengthen those bonds. It’s the best way for parents to impart their values, but also to give their children better tools with which to tackle the challenges that families usually face in thematic succession…we know the obvious ones, alcoholism or impulsive rage, but any family will have other shared epigenetic challenges. Overconfidence, social anxiety, a streak of nihilism, or terrible risk assessment. I think a shared story within a family gives children the benefit of learning from the parents’ successes and failures. 

Could you share something of your personal faith?

It’s difficult to summarize a belief system. I’m a Christian, but that seems quite broad to say. That’s why we have the Apostle’s Creed, which is largely the tenets that are most immutable, and the rest we can argue about with ourselves over our lifetimes. But the epigraph form THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV (featured in my book) is the closest I’ve ever seen an author come to expressing a personal faith akin to mine. I’ll paste it here: 

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened. 

I think it’s remarkable how much cosmology and theology he packs into those few lines. If you were to ask me, over a coffee, to express my personal faith, I’d be likely to quote you those two texts first and then ramble on until you asked the waiter for the check. 

I love that quote. What other authors have had a particular influence on you? 

I joke that there are no authors. There is only Italo Calvino. Of course, that’s a bit much, but I love his work. Terry Pratchett and Raymond Chandler are two others who greatly shaped my style. In fact, it might just be an amalgam of those there. Modern writers I adore are Karen Russell and Hal Johnson. 

Where is your mother now?

She is in Pennsylvania, where she gardens and bakes and is quite happy. She volunteers at her church, and has married a kind man. She writes, especially in Farsi, for various missions organizations. It’s a lovely place to have ended up, after a story like hers.

And your father?

He still lives in Iran, and we speak about once a month. 

What is truth?

I have always liked the sentiment that is attributed to Aldous Huxley and Philip K Dick in different forms, which is: truth is that which does not cease to exist because it’s ignored. This is clever, because it employs the “via negativa,” approach of defining inexpressibly large ideas by speaking of the negative space around them. I can’t tell you all that is Truth. But I can tell you what isn’t True: anything that can, or will, pass away. 

Also at Redeemed Reader:

More interviews! Here’s Jonathan Bean on his picture book about homeschooling, Judah Ben on Pilgrim’s Progress and Christian Rap, and Meghan Cox Gurdon on “dark” YA fiction.