Olivia: Alright Jackson, you've finished the book. The floor is yours. Give me your five-word review. Jackson: Okay, let me think. I've got it. Poop, kings, heartbreak, hope, baklava. Olivia: That is surprisingly, profoundly accurate. I love it. Mine is: A beautiful, true, messy lie. Jackson: Aha! See, that's what I want to talk about. Your review gets right to the central paradox of this whole thing. This book is Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story) by Daniel Nayeri. Olivia: Exactly. And Nayeri's own life is the blueprint for this story. He was an Iranian refugee who landed in Oklahoma as a boy, just like his narrator. This book was a critical darling—it swept the young adult literary awards, winning the Michael L. Printz Award and a Newbery Honor. Jackson: Wow, so the big ones. Olivia: The biggest. But it’s also known for being unconventional, for challenging what a memoir can even be, which has made it a bit polarizing for some readers. Jackson: It definitely challenges the reader. From page one, you feel like you're in the hands of this kid who's just… talking. He's standing in front of his middle school class in Oklahoma, and he's desperately trying to convince his classmates, and by extension you, the reader, that his life is worth listening to. Olivia: And that's our first big idea today. He's not just talking; he's fighting for his life with stories. He's a modern-day Scheherazade, spinning tales to survive in a hostile new kingdom: an American middle school.

Jackson: Okay, Scheherazade. I get the reference—the storyteller from One Thousand and One Nights who tells stories to a murderous king to keep herself alive each night. But how does that really apply to a kid on a school bus getting bullied? Olivia: Because for the narrator, Khosrou, the stakes feel just as high. He's an outsider in every sense. He's poor, he's from a country his classmates associate with terrorism, his name is "weird," and he smells like his mom's cooking. He has no social currency. His only power, his only weapon, is his history. So he starts telling stories. Jackson: And these aren't just any stories. He's not making up tales about dragons or genies to fit in. He's dropping these epic, almost unbelievable family histories on them. Olivia: Exactly. And the most powerful of these is the story of his mother, Sima. This is the foundational myth of his entire existence. It starts in London, where his little sister is at daycare and gets her finger severed in a door. It's a horrific accident. Jackson: Oh man, that's awful. Olivia: In the chaos, his sister, who is just a toddler, says she saw Jesus, who comforted her. For his mother, a doctor and a woman of science, this is a profound, life-altering moment. She converts to Christianity, and when they return to Iran, her faith becomes this unstoppable force. She starts a secret, underground church in their home. Jackson: In Iran, during that time? That sounds incredibly dangerous. Olivia: It was. The government's religious police, the Komiteh, find out. A fatwa, a death sentence, is issued against her for apostasy. One day, they come for her. They abduct her, take her to a secret location, and interrogate her for days. They want the names of the other Christians in her group. Jackson: And what does she do? Olivia: She refuses. She tells them nothing. The narrator describes his mother as an "unstoppable force," and this is the ultimate proof. She stares down her interrogators, endures psychological torture, and is eventually, miraculously, let go, but with a clear warning: leave the country or die. That's why they become refugees. That's why they end up in Oklahoma. Jackson: Wow. So when he's standing in front of his class, he's not just telling a cool story. He's telling them, "My mom is a superhero. We're not just poor refugees; we are exiles from an epic battle between good and evil." That's… an incredible way to reframe your own identity. Olivia: It's his proof of worth. He's trying to show them that his family's blood is "the blood of kings and queens," not just in a mythical sense, but in a moral one. His mother is a queen. Jackson: That makes me think about the other stories he tells, like the one about his ancestor who was a doctor and healed an Indian pasha's daughter, earning the family immense wealth. Is he trying to do the same thing? To tell his classmates, "Hey, I'm not just some kid you can push around. I'm descended from legends." Olivia: I think so. He's weaving a tapestry of identity from all these threads—the mythic, the historic, and the deeply personal. He's trying to build a self that is too grand, too important to be ignored or dismissed. Jackson: But that's where it gets complicated, right? Because some of these stories feel like they could be true, like his mom's. Others feel... a bit more like legends. And the book itself seems to lean into that ambiguity. Olivia: It absolutely does. And that brings us to the really tricky, brilliant part of this book, which is embedded in your five-word review: poop. And in my review: the messy lie. What actually makes a story "true"?

Jackson: Right. This is the part that bent my brain a little. The title is a paradox, and the narrator keeps telling us things that make us question if we can trust him. He even has a whole chapter titled "Persians Are Liars." Olivia: He does, and he tackles that stereotype head-on. But he reframes it through a beautiful cultural concept: the "Persian flaw." He explains that traditional Persian rug makers, who spend years creating these perfect, intricate masterpieces, will intentionally weave a single, tiny mistake into the pattern. Jackson: Why would they do that? Ruin a perfect work? Olivia: Because, as the tradition goes, only God is perfect. To create a flawless object is an act of hubris. The flaw is a mark of humility, a nod to a higher truth. And Nayeri argues that this is how storytelling works, too. A perfect, clean, linear story is a lie. A true story has to have a flaw. Jackson: Okay, I think I'm following. So the "flaws" in his storytelling—the parts that seem messy or contradictory—are intentional? Olivia: They are the mark of its authenticity. In the author's note at the end of the book, Nayeri is explicit about this. He says the book is a "patchwork text," that he changed names, combined characters, and that his memory is filtered through the lens of a child who "misunderstood a great deal." His story is full of flaws. Jackson: Can you give an example of one of these flaws from the book? Olivia: The most powerful one for me is when he recounts their time in Dubai, right after his parents have decided to divorce. He presents two conflicting memories of this traumatic period. In one, he's at a tense breakfast with his parents. They're fighting, and to distract from the tension, he starts smearing ketchup all over his flatbread, making a huge, childish mess. It's a sad, small, domestic scene. Jackson: Okay, a ketchup memory. What's the other one? Olivia: The other memory is pure drama. He's at a hotel pool with his father, desperate for his attention. So he attempts a dangerous dive into the shallow end, cracks his head open, and the pool slowly fills with his blood. It's a graphic, horrifying image of a boy literally breaking himself to get his father to look at him. Jackson: Whoa. Blood or ketchup. That's a huge difference. Which one was real? Olivia: He doesn't know. He writes that he has both memories, and he can't be sure which one is the fact. And that's the point. The factual truth is lost. What's real, what's undeniably true, is the emotional core: the trauma of his parents' separation and his desperate longing for his father's love. That trauma manifests in his memory as either a pathetic mess or a bloody catastrophe. Both are emotionally true. Jackson: Hold on, though. If he's admitting he might be misremembering or even inventing details, how can the book be subtitled "a true story"? Isn't that just… a fancy way of saying he's lying? A lot of readers get hung up on this. Olivia: I get why they do. We're trained to expect memoirs to be fact-checked and objective. But Nayeri's argument is that for a refugee, for a child who has survived trauma, memory doesn't work that way. It's not a clean recording. It's a collection of shrapnel. The "truth" isn't in the objective facts, but in the shape of the broken pieces. The story is true to the experience of remembering. Jackson: That’s a huge shift in perspective. It’s like the truth isn’t what happened, but how what happened feels, even years later. Which I guess explains the poop stories. Olivia: It completely explains the poop stories! He tells these mortifying, hilarious stories about struggling with Western toilets because he was used to squatting. They're uncomfortable and visceral, but they are a profoundly true depiction of the physical, gut-level reality of being displaced. Your body itself is in a foreign land. The stories are true because they feel true in your bones, in your gut.

Jackson: Okay, it's all clicking into place. The stories he tells are his armor in Oklahoma. They are his way of saying, "I am not nothing, I am someone." But the way he tells them—all fragmented, messy, with poop and blood and myths mixed together—is the truest thing of all. It's a perfect portrait of what memory actually feels like for someone who's been through that kind of upheaval. Olivia: Exactly. He's not just telling his story; he's teaching us how all our stories are told, how all our memories are constructed. He’s giving us a new language for truth. There's this incredible line in his author's note that I think sums it all up. He writes, "This was my life, as I experienced it, and it is both fiction and nonfiction at the same time. Your memories are too, if you'll admit it." Jackson: Wow. "Your memories are too." That lands hard. He’s turning the mirror back on the reader. It makes you wonder, what are the "Persian flaws" in our own life stories? The messy bits, the contradictions, the things we try to edit out, that are actually the most honest parts of who we are? Olivia: That's a perfect question. And it’s a great one for our listeners. What are the stories you tell about yourself, and what are the "flaws" that you think make them true? We’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts. You can always find us on our socials. Jackson: It's a beautiful, challenging, and unforgettable book. It redefines what a story can be. Olivia: It really does. It argues that the saddest things—loss, exile, heartbreak—become untrue only when we find a way to tell their story, to weave them into a narrative that is flawed, but strong enough to hold our truth. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.