When Truth No Longer Counts, How Does a Memoirist Tell Her Story?
TO NAME THE BIGGER LIE: A Memoir in Two Stories, by Sarah Viren
It’s an experience I’m betting most of us have had over the last decade: the creeping feeling that a common truth no longer exists. Where once there were facts, now there is strife. Where once there was one America, now there are two. (At least.) Where once there were agreed-upon narratives, now there are competing stories, falsehoods and deceptions.
The writer Sarah Viren became renowned as the victim of a false narrative when, in 2020, she published an article in The New York Times Magazine titled “The Accusations Were Lies. But Could We Prove It?” In it, she told how, the previous year, her wife, Marta, was accused of sexual harassment and became the subject of a Title IX investigation at Arizona State University, where both women are professors. Eventually the accusations were proved to be the work of a malignant competitor who was attempting to shove a boulder into the middle of the couple’s career path.
Now Viren has written the strange and wonderful “To Name the Bigger Lie,” a memoir that includes this awful tale. But the book is not the one that readers of the original article might expect. The subtitle promises “a memoir in two stories”;doubleness is a crucial theme. The book is preoccupied with twinned phenomena and dual perspectives. It’s a book for our times, when singular truths seem less certain with each passing day.
The project began life as a more straightforward memoir. In 2016, Viren was unsettled (perhaps too weak a word) by the ascension of Donald Trump and the accompanying surge in conspiracy theories. She was reminded of her experiences growing up in Florida in the 1990s — specifically, of a class at her high school magnet program called “Theory of Knowledge.” The class was taught by Dr. Whiles, a polarizing figure who reveled in provoking his students. Dr. Whiles (a pseudonym) became more and more unhinged during Viren’s years studying with him — or did he? Perhaps his escalating eccentricity was all in aid of discomfiting his students and forcing them to think more independently, more critically.
Most damagingly, Dr. Whiles presented the class with a video arguing that the Holocaust had never happened — an incident that all but destroyed Viren’s shaky trust in her teacher, even as her classmates fell prey to the lie. This was the story she returned to in 2016, as she contemplated the rise of Donald Trump and with it the rise of a culture of lies:
I kept reading or hearing the same explanation for his popularity: how the uneducated and poor in our country had fallen for a politician who thrived on hate, lies and conspiracy theories. … I remembered how smart everyone told us we were in high school, and yet how many of us had believed, or at least failed to dispute, the worldview that I remember Dr. Whiles presenting our junior year: one in which civilization had been lost, a sensate culture loomed in the future, and those to blame were a shadowy government hidden somewhere in the wings.
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Alert readers will notice that there are already instances of doubling in that paragraph, not just the splitting of truth into halves, but the splitting of the self: There’s present Sarah and there’s past Sarah. Of course, this is true of every memoir. The current self — that is, the person writing the story — is different from the earlier self, the subject of the book. Part of a memoirist’s style, and even her meaning, lies in how she decides to deal with this split. She can make this schism visible, or she can pretend it doesn’t exist.
Viren cites Virginia Woolf’s description of those two selves as “I now” and “I then.” The “I now” of Viren’s book is fairly hidden at the start: After a brief prologue, it opens novelistically, expertly immersing us in teenage Sarah’s world. She brings us along as she makes her way through high school and navigates her relationship with Dr. Whiles and her classmates.
Slowly, however, Viren disrupts the “I then” with commentary by her current self. We get to know the person who is telling the story, the “I now.” “As with most binaries,” Viren writes, “there is something inaccurate, or perhaps dishonest, about Woolf’s neat bifurcation of the self within memoir: It assumes the ‘I now’ remains static, that nothing ever happens to us while we are writing an essay or a book.” Because, of course, the self is not static — life keeps occurring, things keep happening to the writer of the book. And what happened to the writer of this book is that her world was turned upside down by a Title IX investigation.
The investigation, and the false accusations that precipitated it, are not overtly related to the story Viren was writing at the time, the story of Dr. Whiles. But here we come to the great dramatic leap of this book, which is not the terrible thing that happened to Viren and her wife, though that is certainly horrifying. The great dramatic leap is Viren’s decision to include the two stories, the two separate periods of her life, the two selves.
After Viren’s wife was accused, the questions Viren was exploring suddenly seemed more urgent: Does truth matter? What is the difference between truth and meaning? What happens to a person or to a country when truth is no longer valued? You can almost feel her take a deep breath as she decides to present her two stories in tandem.
When Viren was in Dr. Whiles’s class, the students discussed Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The allegory becomes what Viren calls the “shadow text” of her book. You sense her pressing desire to make meaning out of these two narratives, a feeling that if she can make sense of them, she can emerge from the cave. If the opening section of the book is “I then,” and the second section is “I now,” then the final section of the book is something else: Viren’s attempt to create her own series of parables, in which she is both the person in the cave’s shadows and the person emerging into the light — the person finding the truth. She eventually abandons the conventions of memoir altogether, narrating dreams, imaginary scenes and letters to the reader.
As someone who has written memoir, I may be the perfect audience for this book. Viren’s questions are the same ones at the core of my own books — perhaps at the core of every memoir: How can I be both these people at once, the old self and the new? And how can I speak — or even know — the truth?
In the end, for Viren, it is writing itself that stands in for truth. She seems to be saying that creating art is as much meaning as we can hope for in this world. This might sound self-congratulatory, but it struck me as the ideal ending for this ouroboros of a book.
Claire Dederer is the author, most recently, of “Monsters.”
TO NAME THE BIGGER LIE: A Memoir in Two Stories | By Sarah Viren | 289 pp. | Scribner | $28
……Read full article on The New York Times-Books
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