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Everything Sad Is Untrue

Daniel Nayeri
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56 pages • 1 hour read

Daniel Nayeri

Everything Sad Is Untrue

Daniel Nayeri
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2020

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Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Pages 105-214Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 105-136 Summary

Ray and Daniel’s mother divorced once, but when Ray told the pastor he repented, the pastor told Daniel’s mother to remarry him.

Aziz eventually remarried, and her new husband, Agha, adopted Ellie, who married at 13. Agha wanted to have his own kids with Aziz, but no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t have kids. Aziz told Agha she must be infertile to save him the humiliation, and he asked her for a divorce. She eventually married again, but only to have a companion.

Ellie now lives in England. Before she left Iran, she and her husband had four kids, and her husband, Arman, often cheated on her. She would stay home and write poetry. She eventually fell in love with another man, who Daniel imagines to be a librarian. The only real information he has is that his grandmother and her lover decided to kill her husband. The lover tried to sneak in and shoot Arman. Ellie was waiting at a train station, planning to leave behind her children. A man arrived to tell her that her lover was dead and that her husband was sending her away with her youngest daughter, Sanaz.

Pages 137-158 Summary

Daniel details how he oversleeps on purpose so that he misses his first period, and therefore his bully. He also waits at the end of the lunch line to run out the clock because he can’t afford to buy lunch. Even on the bus, he thinks of all the ways to protect himself from bullies. When he arrives home, he makes a snack for himself while his sister is at a club meeting and his mom is in graduate school—again since she has a PhD and a medical degree from Iran—so she comes home late as well.

Pages 159-214 Summary

Daniel and his sister, Dina, went to England for the first time for their aunt Sanaz’s wedding to an Englishman. There, Daniel meets his grandmother. His father bought fancy luggage for the occasion, but he sewed drugs into the lining. While his mother helped with the wedding and learned about Christianity, his dad met with other drug addicts. While there, Daniel’s sister is put in daycare since they stay for months, and another kid slams a door on her hand.

As Dina recovered, she claims she saw a man, and Ellie suggests that it was Jesus and that Daniel’s sister was a Christian, which is a crime in Iran. At the time, his mother followed Shiite Islam, the branch that follows the Ali, Muhammad’s cousin, after the Prophet’s death. However, she became Christian after learning more about it. Back in Iran, she joined a secret church, the pastor of which would later be killed by the Komiteh, the secret police.

Daniel’s mother kept a cross on her rearview mirror, and eventually received a threatening note. She took it down only to get a larger cross. The Komiteh then came and took her.

When Daniel asks his mother about it, he wonders if she went to the same prison his father went to when he was arrested for selling drugs. However, she was taken to a house and asked for the names of other church members. They eventually let her go, giving her one week to give them the names.

Pages 105-214 Analysis

More is revealed about Daniel’s mother, Sima, and her family in this section, as it describes the exile of his grandmother and the reasons behind their departure from Iran. It also sets the stage for his description of his mother as “unstoppable” through her willingness to put up with Ray (311). Even though he beats her, she remarries him, both because the pastor suggests she does and for the financial benefits of having another income to provide for her children.

Additionally, the theme of hoping and anticipation in trying times is introduced. Sima is a prime example of this, and Daniel will return to the fact that she has persisted despite every hardship thrown at her. Daniel also explains his definition of bravery. He says, “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” (122). This bravery is rooted in the belief that things can be better, and it also touches on the reason that Daniel is so focused on stories as well, as he believes poets to be brave for creating something. He finds comfort in these stories as a means of survival, of being brave in the face of challenges, much like Scheherazade continued to weave story after story for the king to stay alive.

Daniel also builds on the theme of the experience of immigrant children and attempts to connect. He describes his daily life, explaining that he wakes late each morning to avoid his bully. He does not feel accepted and is constantly made to feel like he is different from his classmates, and so his stories continue to be a way for him to ingratiate himself with readers.

Finally, religion as a motif is critical in this section. It is illegal to be a Christian in Iran and therefore can be fatal. As Massoud believes, “it was religion that ruined everything” since it was Daniel’s aunt’s wedding that introduced Sima to Christianity (200). Her conversion is the impetus for their having to depart from Iran and eventually come to the United States.

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