I'm beginning my resolve to blog all my reads this year by reviewing the last book I read in 2022. It is lucky then that the last book I read was such a good one. Everything Sad is Untrue is a memoir. I don't read a lot of memoirs and I didn't properly realize that this was one when I started.
The events are told from the perspective of Daniel Nayeri when he is in middle school and appears to be in the form of a series of journal entries written for a class assignment. Daniel is both directly addressing the reader in places while also clearly writing with the idea of his classmates and teacher as his audience.
The narrative covers Daniel's first memories around age 3 and continues through to the "present" point in the narrative. In those years, Daniel and his mother an sister leave their homes in Iran as refugees fleeing a fatwa placed on their heads and end up in Oklahoma. Despite being a doctor in Iran, Daniel's mom is forced to start over and life is tough.
Daniel tries to explain a completely different culture to a class of middle-schoolers. He uses Persian stories and episodes from 1001 Arabian Nights to explain ideas to a bunch of kids who are...well, awful but typical.
Despite being bullied and harassed, Daniel's narrative is about finding understanding through narrative. In a way, it does a good job of examining how life and story can never be quite the same thing. I really enjoyed the voice and interweaving of the narratives. By the end of the memoir, I found myself fully engaged and interested in the story. It really is a very good book.
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