Do the stories we tell about ourselves have the power to change us? Our guest today says they can.
To wrap up our season on meaning and purpose, we talk with author Daniel Nayeri. In his award-winning young adult novel, Everything Sad is Untrue, Daniel writes from the perspective of his twelve-year-old self, sharing the story of how he, his sister, and his mother immigrated from Iran to Edmond, Oklahoma, after his mother’s conversion from Islam to Christianity. Although this immigration kept his family out of prison (or worse), life in the U.S. came at a cost, too. Through his storytelling, Daniel also processes what he left behind: his beloved stuffed animal ("Mr. Sheep Sheep"), a life of comfort in Iran, and his larger-than-life father.
In this episode, we explore finding meaning through storytelling, the impact of an active imagination, and how the sustaining hope of the Christian story makes even a refugee camp in the Italian countryside a place of opportunity and joy.
My mother made it very much clear that we're going to end up somewhere. It's going to be great. We're going to learn the language. There was just this sense that we're waiting for some great thing to happen. And it changed the way we waited. It changed the way we saw things.
The epigraph of [Everything Sad Is Untrue] is the big statement that explicates the entirety of that idea, where he says, “I believe, like a child, that suffering will be healed and made up for" [from The Brothers Karamazov]. Right? We're still in the middle of this story.
I think imagination is a muscle. I mean that quite literally. Repetition of imagining makes you better at imagining. And I think a lot of people don't give themselves enough time to wander.
You are ruled by the stories you tell. And you are most ruled by the stories you tell about yourself to yourself. You are the person who is telling yourself who you are. You are building that narrative, as any propagandist does. And I would ask you not to tell the mean ones.
