Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

some people say Edmond, Oklahoma, looks like Italy in the springtime. Some people are idiots.

We don’t owe anyone our sadness.

Bones break over and over and you can get used to it.

Just knowing they could never hurt you—that would scare people.

You might even say, “We don’t owe anyone our sadness, but the sharing of it is what friends do. It makes the sadness less. Friends don’t care if you like the same football squad.”

THERE IS AN AMERICAN filmmaker named Orson Welles who said, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”

And Doctor Hamond (pastor, not a doctor) says, “It’ll be alright in the end, folks. If it’s not alright, then it’s not the end,”

But my point is don’t worry.

I got hit in the jaw about twice a week, but nobody ever broke it, because none of them had a third-degree black belt.

A few months later, Ray went to Pastor Hamond and told him he was repented—which meant he was sorry—and Pastor Hamond told my mom she should marry him again, because we didn’t have any money and it was worse to Jesus if we were on government welfare.

So that was the second time they got married—in the pastor’s office—and they didn’t tell us about it until Ray started hanging around again. He just showed up one Sunday with the stuff to make his special Korean ribs, which had to be mar...

Over dinner three days later, they told us they were back together and that we were all moving into a house. That was when I learned if you can’t fight, you don’t get a vote in anything.

Aziz and Hassan had a daughter before he died. That girl grew up to be my grandma Ellie, who plotted to kill her husband and was exiled to England.

In any story the two hardest things to be are a widow or an orphan. Those are the bad cards to draw from the deck marked “life.”

Because those are the two moments the people you love the most die. It’s heart break. Heart shatter. Heart starve.

It’s so much loss that it’s easier if you just died and started the game over. But you can’t. You have to wander. Part of it is losing your tribe and being home...

I won’t lie to you. The deck marked “life” is stacked full of bum cards.

Aziz was both an orphan and a widow, and the dark nights must have seemed unbearably long. Long enough to lose every memory and become a blank-faced animal.

every good story has a turn a...

Agha wanted his own kids eventually, but they couldn’t have any when they tried. They went to the physician—who had a good relationship with Agha and who didn’t even remember Hassan. He told them they would need a fertility test. Aziz wanted to spare Agha the humiliation, and so she said, “It’s me. I’m barren. It’s my fault.”

She assumed Agha would say, “No no. That’s impossible. You already had a daughter. Of course it’s me.”

But he didn’t. He sat in the physician’s office blank-faced, red in the cheeks. He ...

And suddenly, Aziz was in a room with the man who took her first husband from her, and the one who took her second. The word Agha had used, setalagheh, was the kind of divorce reserved in Islam for men who have threefold anger. Men so angry they would n...

The twist is sometimes a knife.

Aziz was alone again, this time for the rest of her life. When she was very old, she married again for companionship. He was the one who liked sesame candy, but never ate it because he was bedridden.

And so by the time I met Aziz, she was the old woman who offered stale candy and whose h...

She would play love songs she used to listen to with Agha (or Hassan, I don’t know) and cry. I would run out to the little river. She would shut herself off from the world. And if you listened real hard for the sound of far-off girls laughing as they returned...

ALL MY LIFE, MY GRANDMA Ellie (Aziz’s daughter, my mom’s mom) has lived in England. The legend was that her husband, my grandpa, forced her to go or else he would kill her. His name was Arman and I have zero memories of him. Not one.

I can bring up his face in my mind, but only because my mom had a picture of him in her shoebox while we were escaping Iran.

“He worked very hard,” she said. That was all she could come up with. “And he wanted all his kids educated. That was very important,” which if you know my mom, you know is a case for him being a villain. All her life she wanted to be a farmer. His pressure made her go to med school.

I have more memories of Jonboy the pastor’s son than all my uncles combined.

Grownies will

talk sometimes in boring words about boring ideas to groom each other like apes, to let each other

know they’r...

Imagine how unlikely it is for two creatures of any kind to see each other—through the shadows of the woods—eyes connecting, attention ready. For a moment like that all the universe would have to conspire to move all its pieces and line them up just so.

I think a person gets seen, really looked at, looked into, seen the way a leopard would see into you, maybe ten times in their entire life.

Hunting isn’t a sin if it’s useful.

there is no eating a baby owl, that’s not useful like hunting a pheasant.

told you all this because killing owls is no different than killing kittens. In case you thought I was putting myself above anybody. I’m not above anybody.

That was the second innocent thing I killed, if you count the bull. And that was before I even turned five.

OKLAHOMA IS THE ONLY state in the Union where it is legal to own an anti-tank sniper rifle. It shoots bullets the size of milk cartons and if you hit a deer with it, all you leave is red mist.

OF MY GRANDPARENTS, my grandma Ellie was the least likely to kill any animals. She always had a princess quality about her, which is to say, people talked about her like she was spoiled.

I don’t know what it would be like to be thirteen and married. I guess one thing it makes you is scared all the time that everyone will hurt you. Even as she got older, people said she acted like a kid—thought only about her own problems—and wasn’t very mother-like.

I don’t have any stories about her early life.

Arman—the pinched grandfather I told you about from the picture—her husband, was a bad husband, who was known as “the Governor,” and governed mostly a bunch of affairs with other women.

Ellie took more damage than an Oklahoma trailer park in a tornado and people still blamed her for retreating into the bomb shelter of her own mind.

Those are the only facts I know. Child bride. Horrible husband. I could live a thousand years and they’d still be...

The bones of the history are that they had four kids, grew a...

The rest of the story I only ever heard through the cracks of doors, as my aunts whispered it to each other over tea—years later in places like Toronto, London, and Edmond, after they had surviv...

Every side of an explosion look...