Khosrou Daniel Nayeri: Hi, my name is Khosrou Daniel Nayeri and I am the author of Everything Sad Is Untrue (A True Story). This book was inspired by my own childhood about the story of my family. It begins with my mother converting to Christianity in Iran, where I was born, and running afoul of the secret police there, the Komitehāye, and very quickly she had a fatwa on her head and so we had to escape and became refugees until we landed in Oklahoma when I was about seven or eight.

And so that's where the story begins with the narrator, who's my character, standing in front of a classroom of his peers, and he's trying to express to them what his life was like back in Iran when he had a complete family and his dad was there and all sorts of wonderful toys and experiences. And of course they don't believe him. They think he's this refugee kid who's making up all these stories to sound important and fabulous. And of course the stories have gotten bigger, and they're full of the mythology and the legends and the history of Persia. The land of storytelling grows and grows, and here he is in this classroom, and the kids are getting more and more suspicious, and he starts to feel like Scheherazade, the great storyteller of my culture. It continues until we get to the climax where we get news that this narrator's father, the one from Iran, the one who was this great figure of Persian lore and poetry is going to visit Edmond, Oklahoma, the land of reality and real life. So what will happen? Will he arrive and be a larger than life hero or will he be just some guy?

So I had to do quite a bit of research for it. Of course, it is all my memories, but we have pretty flawed memories and I was pretty young for quite a bit of it. And of course there are generations before mine. I tell the story of my great-grandmother and my grandmother and my mom. So I did a lot of interviews with family members and research about the history of Iran at the time. And a lot of reading of the great classic literature of Iran as well. My favorite thing I learned while I was researching this book was reading the Shahnameh by Ferdowsi. He's one of the great classic writers of Persian literature, and that book in particular is like our national epic. It's like our Odyssey or Song of Roland. It's a really important book for the culture and it kind of tells the history of Persian kings. The Shahnameh means the letter to the king or the king letter. And he tells that history. And I loved going back into that.

If there's one thing I would want readers to take away from the book is the story of my mom. She's the hero of the story. And in it, you see a character who stumbles a lot and has a lot of challenges. She's constantly met with problems and being knocked down and she just never stops. You know, the phrase that gets used for her is if you don't stop, you're unstoppable and she is not a particularly physically intimidating person, but gosh, she is absolutely unstoppable in life. And I think that's probably the main thing I would want someone to take away.