I was a little late to the party reading Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri, and if you haven’t read it yet, I urge you to. It’s spectacular. It took a little bit of getting into, and it was not at all the type of book I would typically read (it’s YA, for starters, which is not my thing), but it’s the book I will be recommending to everyone for months or years to come, and one I have already tucked away on mental shelf of books to share with my kids once they’re old enough.
I won’t offer you a synopsis of the story, partly because that is not my strong suit and partly because it’s very difficult to describe. Instead, I will launch into the reflections it prompted at the crossroads of mothers and myths - both of which are at the core of this fictionalised memoir.
The hero of Nayeri’s book is his mother - a realisation that 12 year old Daniel has in the process of telling his story - but like any good hero, she is complicated. In fact, the majority of the tragedy in Nayeri’s traumatic childhood can be traced to a decision, or sequence of decisions, made by his mother. From the reader’s perspective, she had many opportunities to change the course of her children’s lives, to make decisions that would have kept them safer, would have offered a more “normal” life. At the same time, throughout the part of his life conveyed in the book (early childhood until middle school), his mother is his rock. She created the storms, but she is also his stability throughout them, and the only person who loves him purely and unrelentingly.
Everything Sad is Untrue is, at least as I read it, is an invitation to consider the lines between myth and reality in the lives of all people. Myths contain a lot of truth, and truth - the raw data of life - is only part of the story.
I started to think about the myth of my own mother, and my motherhood. The relationship between mother and child is foundational to every person’s story, a fact we cannot ignore in the therapy culture we live in today. Because of this, mothers are easily mythologised. Stories are told of our mothers, grandmothers, and beyond, that highlight the virtues of grit, or fidelity, or selflessness, or making really good pies. Mothers are also subject to harsh judgments, from their children and from society - a mother who is not present enough to her children, a mother who coddles her children, a mother who sacrificed too much for her children, a mother who did not sacrifice enough. Stories are told about mothers as both hagiography and cautionary tale.
Most of us can probably tell stories of both types about our own mothers. I have a little caché of anecdotes about my mother that tell different stories about her, each true, but none of them the full truth. These are stories that I share with my husband, or laugh about with my friends, or pass on to my children; stories about who my mother is, or perhaps more precisely, the kind of mother she is. Some of these stories offer unfair characterisations, and all of them likely miss a lot of context - context that children rarely grasp when they consider the choices and behaviours of their parents.
It is clear that there is much left unsaid in Nayeri’s account of his mother, in the facts as well as in his feelings about her. This is a recurring theme of the book - that what we don’t know is as formative as what we do. We could, as readers, consider that his mother is mythologised: so much is missing in his telling of her that we can barely consider her to be “true”. And yet, we understand that he is communicating essential truths about who she is and how he feels about her, even if we simultaneously understand that there are many invisible layers of complication and mess, too.
Is this not true of how we conceptualise our own mothers, and even ourselves as mothers? In the
interview with Daniel Nayeri (which I highly recommend - even if you don’t listen to the read along episodes, the interview is fantastic and worth listening to even if you haven’t read the book), they talk quite a bit about how mothers are never “real people”. We usually fail to give much thought to who our mothers were before they became mothers, or even who they were independently of motherhood after having children. Even if we know about their paid work or their hobbies, their friends and their interests, we often consider those things in relation to ourselves and the impact it had on their motherhood. The natural egocentrism of the child who views their mother only in relation to themselves never entirely leaves us; it is very hard to disentangle our feelings about who are mothers are from their successes and failures in mothering.As mothers ourselves, we are constantly writing and rewriting the story of the mother we hope to be, and the stories our own children might tell of us are never far from our minds. We make choices that we hope will map them back to our love for them, yet we remain painfully aware that those choices might precipitate tales we never wanted to be a part of, much less be authors of, in our children’s lives. Especially in this era of parenting advice overload and fear mongering about the consequences if we do it wrong, it’s hard not to constantly interrogate whether the mother that our children experience is the same as the mother we’re trying to be. We write endless scripts for what our kids might think or say about us when they’re old enough to realise that for the most part, mothers are just muddling through, sometimes getting it right and often getting it wrong.
Nayeri’s mother loves her children very well in many ways, and is “unstoppable” - the word Nayeri lands on - in her determination to nourish them, to offer them the best possible in very challenging circumstances, to create a semblance of stability in an ostensibly unstable life. She also makes some poor choices, born of her own vulnerabilities, fragilities, and circumstances. Like all mothers, she told herself a story about what would be best for her kids that often clashed with her kids’ lived experiences, precipitating a divergence in the narrative between her perceptions and those of her children.
The stories we write of our own motherhood weave meaning into the interminable decision making of parenting, and the relentlessness of day-to-day life when trying to keep kids fed, clean, safe-ish, and happy-ish. We know that all the little moments are part of a much bigger narrative; one that has Love as both its author and its fulfilment. We hope that, even if our children’s stories of us have some different inflections than we’d hoped, that they will still know that love was the constant.
Love this post, Gina. I need to read this book!
I just finished this book! Your reflection here is poignant. Thanks for putting so many of my feelings to words.