Photo courtesy of Reams Photography

On a Sunday shortly after September 11, 2001, Daniel Nayeri attended Redeemer Presbyterian Church, as he had done most Sundays since beginning his undergraduate studies at New York University in 2000. In the bulletin he noticed a lengthy quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Brother’s Karamazov” about how all suffering would be made up for in the end, and that “something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”

Nayeri tore out the quote and for years kept it as a bookmark.

When he published his memoir in 2020, “Everything Sad is Untrue,” he included the Dostoyevsky passage as the book’s epigraph.

“Everything Sad is Untrue” won the Printz Award for literary excellence in young adult literature. Nayeri’s subsequent books for young readers, “The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams” and “The Teacher of Nomad Land,” were chosen as Newberry Medal Honor Books. “The Teacher of Nomad Land” also won the National Book Award. His latest book, “This is a Door,” which will be published in October, is a finalist for the Kirkus Prize for middle-grade fiction.

Nayeri is from Iran, but his family fled the country after his mother converted to Christianity, a capital offense. The family lived as refugees for several years before settling in Edmond, Oklahoma.

After studying at NYU, Nayeri lived in New York City and worked in publishing for many years. Now he lives in South Carolina with his wife and son and attends a PCA church in the Palmetto State. He talked with byFaith about his works, and the craft and responsibility of writing for young readers. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The book that you are most known for is “Everything Sad is Untrue.” Can you tell us a little bit about it and the J.R.R. Tolkein reference in the title?

The book is an autobiographical story about how I came to the United States with my mother and my sister. It opens with the perspective of a narrator who’s quite young. He’s in middle school and standing in front of the class trying to explain what his life was like before they came to Edmond, Oklahoma, as refugees. And you can imagine a lot of questions pop up. Why were you refugees? It’s because his mother had a Fatwa on her head. Why did she have that? Well, because she converted to Christianity from Islam. And that’s a capital crime.

The children are asking these questions, and he’s trying to express it, and he’s not a great storyteller. He’s realizing that in order to explain how they got to Oklahoma as refugees, he’s got to go all the way back and tell one family story and then another family story. And before he knows it, he’s telling Persian history and mythology and poetry. 
And the stories are getting bigger and more poetic so nobody in his class believes a word he’s saying. And they’re not wrong to do so. Some of these stories are the mythology of Iran.

At the climax, he finds out that his father — who’s this man that he’s posed as a larger-than-life figure — is going to come visit from Iran. And “will he be this kind of heroic individual, or will he be a schlubby Persian guy?” is the question at the heart of the climax.

The story itself is very much about coming to America. My mother did convert from Islam to Christianity, and so we were refugees for about two years. First in the United Arab Emirates and then in Italy, until we were given asylum to the United States. It’s one of those stories that’s a discursive novel, which means it’s a stream of consciousness from this young man. He’s trying to tell you as many things as he can at once and then hopefully it all comes together by the end and you’ve gotten a chance to meet him.

He’s a young man who’s also kind of discovering his love of books and reading, and this was my childhood. I read “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” on repeat. People asked me if I was a real voracious reader and I’m like, “I was; I just read the same books over and over.”

So there’s a quote in “The Return of the King,” that my book’s title is from. The hobbits Sam and Frodo are at the end of this journey that’s been long and perilous and arduous and tragic, and something good comes to pass. And very naively and sweetly, Samwise Gamgee asks, “Is everything sad going to become untrue?” It’s just such a sweet thing to ask. It’s a very childish thing to ask. But Samwise is not that childish, and what you realize is that his question is perfectly valid. There’s no reason to believe that if this one gigantic thing came undone, why wouldn’t the other tragic things become untrue?

I love that quote. I love that phrase. And for a long time, that was the title, “Everything Sad Will Become Untrue.” And then I realized in the voice of my narrator — who’s a little bit more presumptuous than Samwise — that he would think that if it was gonna happen in the future, then you may as well believe it’s happened in the now, which I’m fully aware is a 12 year old’s thought and not actually true. There are sad things in this world at the present moment. His perspective on that is one that is based on the idea that how you perceive the future is how you will live in the present. And so he is claiming this idea, not in any way under the impression that it is an accurate description of life on earth. And so that’s where the title came from.

How did you get to the PCA?

I was an undergrad at NYU in the year 2000. I was looking around for a good place to go, and at that time, Redeemer was meeting in different locations, at Hunter College and at the Cultural and Ethical Society. So I went there. And to be clear, the quote from “The Lord of the Rings” is one that Keller used to talk about all the time. The epigraph in my book is a Dostoyevsky epigraph, and it’s an epigraph that Tim used when we got back from September 11. I tore that out of our bulletin, and I always had it as my little bookmark for my notebook as I was writing this novel. It just felt like the most obvious epigraph to use, but it should be clear that it was given to me by Pastor Keller.

For the next 20 years or so he was our pastor. I volunteered for about eight years as a youth leader, and a lot of my job was to do the pie bake.
We would bake 600 pies the week before Thanksgiving, and we would do it at the Bowery Mission.

Redeemer has the challenge of being in the middle of the city. For a long time, we didn’t have a building. We were renting a building.
And so you would do small groups in people’s houses, but somebody who lives on the Upper West Side has a real hard time coming to Brooklyn just for a two-hour event. So it felt like a place where community was something you have to really focus on. By joining the youth group and doing the pie bake, which sounds silly, that’s where I ended up making lifelong friends. And these particular couples became people I looked up to in their relationship. They became not just friends, but people who my wife and I think of as mentors.

Last fall, “World” published an interview with you, and there was this quote that stuck out to me. You said, “I was a born worshiper, and I tend to use stories to do that. And the challenge is to point those stories in the proper direction.” How do you do that? How do you get your stories to point in the proper direction?

I don’t ever set out and think, How can I write a story about this particular virtue or this particular ethic? I try to think of something as the story first. And my understanding of the world is, if I wanted to write a story about a banker who’s made his life entirely about finances and has a terrible home life, I know what this guy is doing. If I were to paint this person as honestly as I could — reaching into the parts of myself that are obsessed with success and money and have made a ruin of my own relationships — I am fundamentally at some point going to return to what I understand to be as fundamental to this natural world as gravity, which is the reality of a spiritual experience. The struggle of a world beyond the natural of evil against good. And the total and eventual victory of good.

I don’t believe in a world of balance. I believe in a conception that there is a God, and he has opinions.

I’ll give you an example. I just wrote this book coming out in October.
It’s called “This is a Door.” This is an experimental story, but it’s a very traditional hero’s journey. But it’s set in the world of fable. It’s in the world of a far away village, on a mountain, in a country that doesn’t exist. And it’s about a young man who sets out on a journey to find his purpose.

So what do you do? Do you adhere to a general ethic like the good guys are the ones who generally do the things that we in 2026 America like, and the bad guys are the ones who do the things that we don’t think are cool anymore, and that’s the morality of that world? What is the methodology if you’re writing a world that isn’t ours?

It’s very much a parable. He comes to this mentor and tells her, “I don’t know what my purpose is, but I know it will be whatever makes me most useful to the good God and least useful to the bad ones.”
And that’s where he’s going to take his heuristic.

And now we have a setup, but what does that even mean? What does it mean to have one good God and then many possible bad ones in the life of a young person? 
And how do we make ourselves useful?

To make yourself useful to a good God, you have to be in a relationship with that good God. It means you have to be acting on some sort of commission. What does it mean that there’s a world where there are little bad gods? Well, it means there are things that you can ruin your life worshiping. And they want nothing good for you. I am building on a structure that in my little measly imagination is a heuristic that is what I want people to think about in our world in 2026. But that is not built on the events of our history.

So I always think, what are the most basic exercises of our spiritual lives? And how do characters interact with that?

You write for young readers. They have questions about the world, and they make observations. And on the one hand, they want to have their questions validated. But they also need a guide. Otherwise, they’re adrift without anything but their feelings to guide them. As a writer how do you validate the questions and concerns of young people but, also guide them?

I am not a replacement for parenting. As a writer, you can never forget that you’re speaking to other people’s kids. That is not something to take lightly. Whatever I write in these books is fundamentally just one thought that they can try on and taste. But it should have no comparative value to their family and to their parents’ guidance.

My role is to ask questions that will fundamentally destabilize the assumptions that you have and make you ask the questions that might lead you toward better answers.

For a lot of the harder things to talk about in life, the novel is best used in the service of asking as opposed to telling.