I’m absolutely blasting through audiobooks at the moment as I tackle my garden, and this one kept me hooked through many hours of interminable weeding. The blurb calls it ‘part psychological thriller’, which is frankly a bit extreme, but it does have (at least in the first two thirds) that same pacy-ness of a thriller which keeps you wanting to read more.

Sarah Viren has had the misfortune of crossing paths with two men whose definition of the word ‘truth’ doesn’t align with most other people’s. She came up with the concept of this book after the 2016 US election, when words like post-truth and fake news filtered into people’s everyday vocabulary. This new era awakened memories of a high school teacher Viren had who would use conspiracy theories as teaching materials but who, after converting to Catholicism, seemed to unnervingly believe these theories himself. His lessons swayed some students to believe in some huge and damaging lies, including holocaust denialism. 

But midway through writing THAT book, something happened that disrupted Viren and her wife’s world. Her wife was falsely accused of sexual misconduct by several students. As Viren and her family grapple with that, her book shape-shifts along with her reality. There were some really fascinating insights into the ins and outs of writing memoir, of interrogating memory and our own truths. 

I admit that some of the later parts lost me a bit. Viren is a bit of a philosopher, and she begins to imagine conversations between the two lying men in her life and classic philosophers. A lot of that went over my head. I also think that sometimes the book had to work a little too hard to be cohesive. But I think even Viren was aware of that, given the book’s subtitle: ‘a memoir in two stories’.

Overall, a very compelling memoir which explores truth, memory and the dangers of conspiracy theories.