In March 2020, Sarah Viren printed an essay in The New York Times Magazine that arrested the consideration of greater than 1,000,000 individuals.
In it, she advised the story of how her spouse Marta — like Viren, a professor at Arizona State University — was anonymously accused of sexually harassing feminine college students in 2019. The Title IX complaints have been half of a smear marketing campaign in opposition to the couple from a person who was competing with Viren for a artistic writing professorship at the University of Michigan. Viren and Marta rapidly found that this was the truth — however they wanted the info to show it.
The essay — which has now grow to be half of her memoir To Name the Bigger Lie — is gripping partly as a result of it combines a detective story with a Kafkaesque nightmare of turning into tangled in educational forms. Crucially, all through, Viren displays on the relationship between truth and info, and the way info can “tell different stories depending on who is picking them out and placing them in a narrative line.” This layer of rumination on lies, honesty, and nonfiction storytelling takes the essay past a rehashing of wrongdoing and right into a deeper exploration of how simply reality and fiction can blur — a subject that ought to matter to us all.
When Marta was accused, Viren was already engaged on a guide — one that may be a philosophical reckoning with the truth. She had deliberate to jot down about her highschool philosophy instructor, a person who taught his college students to query all the pieces — a worldview that simply accommodated conspiracy theories. Dr. Whiles, as Viren calls him, grew to become a cult determine for some of her friends, and she or he wished to jot down about how “his influence over us complicated easy narratives about who can be hoodwinked and who unveils the truth” in “an allegory of sorts” to elucidate the post-truth Trump years.
But, as Viren writes, “One story can easily interrupt another, just as questions build one atop the next.” She revised her guide challenge, layering the story of the false Title IX allegations atop the story of Dr. Whiles’ deceptions to kind To Name the Bigger Lie. As she traces each males’s lies and the way they skewed her understanding of actuality, she concurrently launches an investigation of the nature of truth. The memoir has the page-turning high quality of a thriller, however as a substitute of monitoring down culprits and fixing mysteries, Viren methodically untangles knotty philosophical tensions in pursuit of what is actual.
To Name the Bigger Lie unfolds in 4 components, every taking its title from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from The Republic, a favourite of Dr. Whiles, and every consciously offered as a “story.” The first, “Strange Prisoners You’re Telling Of,” transports the reader to Viren’s public highschool in Tampa, Florida, the place she attended a magnet program in the 1990s. Freshman yr, they have been meant to be taught analysis and significant considering abilities, however Dr. Whiles ignored the curriculum, opting to deal with it as an introduction to philosophy rooted in asking mind-bending questions. Early in the college yr, he gestured to the clock on the wall and requested if it existed, and if that’s the case, “can we confirm it exists outside our perception of it?”
As youngsters, Viren and her friends have been primed to purchase into that skepticism. The story that held the biggest attraction was that of Plato’s cave. Viren and her friends recall Dr. Whiles telling them this allegory relatively than having them learn it; later, she’d notice that his model was fairly completely different from Plato’s. In each variations, a bunch of prisoners are chained to the flooring of a cave, watching shadows on a wall solid by a fireplace that they cannot see. The prisoners assume that the shadows are actuality, till one, free of his shackles, walks towards the cave’s mouth, the place he is blinded by the gentle of the truth. Fifteen-year-old Viren instantly recognized with the story: “High school often felt like a cave anyway: all of us trapped behind desks…staring at chalkboards filled with lessons we were told to accept as true, often without understanding them first.” But she struggled to flee the cave and work out what was true, a wrestle that Dr. Whiles’ instructing solely compounded.
Viren buildings this primary story round her coming to phrases with what the precise cave of her highschool years was. She writes of how Dr. Whiles ratcheted up his sharing of conspiracy theories when he taught her class once more their junior yr, alluding to the Illuminati, the New World Order, and MKUltra. She writes of starting to doubt Dr. Whiles when he “gave us the answers instead of asking us to figure them out ourselves.” That doubt burst to the fore someday when Dr. Whiles aired just one half of a debate about the Holocaust — the aspect that denied it.
As Viren reconstructs her instructor’s lies, she threads her storytelling with refined commentary on truth, honesty, and narrative. When relaying a scene the place she lied to her mom as an adolescent, as an example, she writes, “Lying separates you from another person, briefly, temporarily, by creating one reality they believe and another you know is true.” The impact is to remind the reader that Viren is not really reproducing the actuality of her highschool years — an unimaginable job — however consciously shaping the narrative, prodding us towards the mouth of the cave.
The second half of the guide, “Would His Eyes Hurt and Would He Flee?” brings us as much as the current, opening with a deepening Viren’s New York Times Magazine essay that additional contextualizes and displays on the story of the accusations. The nameless lies, from a person Viren calls Jay right here, as soon as once more shook her conception of actuality. At the time, Viren had simply obtained a job supply from the University of Michigan and the college was looking for a spousal rent place for Marta; the accusations put all of it in jeopardy. She started to suspect that Jay — somebody she knew casually as a result of they have been “both queer writers working in the academy” — was the perpetrator, as a result of of texts he despatched her.
In the model of this story that Viren has up to date for To Name the Bigger Lie, she weaves in references to the lies and conspiracies of her highschool years. Bringing collectively the two tales permits Viren to additional her exploration into the ease with which one’s sense of the truth will be upended. “All you need us for one person to start lying, and a system — a high school, an investigation, a government — to legitimize that fiction,” she writes, diagnosing how deceit sows doubt.
Viren largely resolves the Title IX story a bit greater than midway via the guide. What stays to be unraveled, although, is why each males lied, what to do about their lies, and how you can dwell in a world the place the barrier between reality and fiction is so flimsy. That this half of the guide is simply as engrossing as what comes earlier than speaks to Viren’s reward for making the stakes of philosophical questions urgent, for turning Plato and Socrates and Schopenhauer and Hannah Arendt into characters in her story about how you can make sense of this world. Because To Name the Bigger Lie, in the finish, is not merely about exposing the falsehoods of the Dr. Whileses and the Jays of the world, however about how the tales we inform form our actuality.
Kristen Martin is engaged on a guide on American orphanhood for Bold Type Books. Her writing has additionally appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The Baffler, and elsewhere. She tweets at @kwistent.