'Lying is also a form of invention'

5 questions for essayist and professor Sarah Viren

I’m cooking up a newsletter on the logistics of planning a sabbatical, particularly for freelance folks. If you’ve got any specific questions, please reply to this and lay ‘em on me.

And have you subscribed yet? Please do - unpaid or paid, it’s a testament to the value you get from these dispatches and keeps this whole effort sustainable.

---

Ever have a book cover that just takes hold of you and won’t let you go? This one popped up at me in a bunch of seemingly disconnected moments and I knew I had to check it out.

Once I did a little research, I realized it was connected to a story that I remembered mesmerizing many people, including my husband, during deep covid. And it also seemed linked to a powerful part of my own biography—growing up in a politically conservative town and being vulnerable to the power of influential teachers, for better and worse.

So let’s just say, this is a dot-connecting book on every level, by a thinker and writer who knows how to draw a line in the most fresh and surprising of ways. I devoured To Name the Bigger Lie. It brought back all kinds of memories for me (including of one of the most frequent commenters here at the Examined Family, my old professor Dennis Dalton…Hi DD! You would love this book so much.) It also represents a kind of nuanced thinking that I am starving for right now—from my books, from my media sources, from my friends, from my own sometimes overly dualistic brain.

So without further ado, meet the conjurer of all the unlikely dot-connecting nourishment, Sarah Viren…

Courtney Martin: I love how you mixed a planned book in with life confronting you mid-writing and some magical realism together. Did you get pushback from editors or others on this unorthodox blend and how did you know it was right for this project? 

Sarah Viren: I didn’t get any pushback from my editor, Sally Howe, who is wonderful, but I definitely heard a lot of doubt and questions from other editors when my agent, Matt McGowan (also wonderful!), started submitting the book proposal three years ago. Many of those editors wanted a more traditional memoir, one that focused on the second story in the book, the story of Jay, which I had already told in a more abridged way in the New York Times Magazine. What excited me, though, as a writer (and a person!) was how Jay helped me understand my high school teacher, who I call Dr. Whiles in the book, and how the stories of both of those men gave me insight into a situation that a lot of us are facing right now, which is the blurring of fact and fiction in our daily lives. The collision of the story of Dr. Whiles and Jay also felt true to life in that none of our experiences ever happen in isolation; the present is always linked to the past. Then the magical stuff near the end came about organically as I was thinking through what it means to “heal” from or escape from a situation in which you’ve been manipulated or lied to or gaslit. Fiction allowed me to enter that speculative realm of “what if?” even as I kept one foot in the nonfictional world of the book itself. 

I’ve been very interested in the literature, like Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward, that argues that part of aging is—best case scenario—becoming less dualistic. Seeing how two truths can exist simultaneously. What do you think about that? 

I haven’t read that book, but I love the idea of complicating dualities or binaries. I was just talking with an old friend about entering middle age, and we realized that one difference is that many of us are leaning into care-taking—whether or not we have kids. Some people focus that care-taking on the self, hence the concept of self-care. But my friend and his partner are in a situation now in which they’re taking care of her mom, who has dementia. Other friends I know have gotten into taking care of their cats or plants or students. My wife is super invested in tending to our water supply right now via laundry-to-landscape and other forms of conservation (along with sharing in the care-taking for our kids, of course).

And that tendency toward care means that we automatically complicate the self-vs-other duality. When you care for others, and when you begin to see others as a part of yourself, that makes it much harder to draw a hard line between your needs and needs the rest of the world. 

That’s an idea I explored to some degree in my book as well, especially near the end. Much of the first part of the book is essentially a quest to figure out the truth of things, as it related to my very specific personal experiences. But near the end of the book, I began to look at how truth is linked to justice, and justice is inherently about community and society—not just the individual.

The opening dedication is to “those denied the sky,” and that is drawn from a line of the poem “Babi Yar” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko that I discuss near the end of the book. That poem was historically about making the truth of the Holocaust more widely known in the Soviet Union—so getting the truth of things out there—but the poem is also about a non-Jewish writer finding solidarity with the Jewish people, which feels to me like justice-work. So in that way, the book may have started out as a dissection of truth vs fiction or truth vs lies, but it evolved to be much less dualistic in that I was more interested in how truth connections to justice, and how the self connects to the community. 

Sarah and her wife, Marta

What has writing this book, and the exploration around truth, taught you about how you parent? How do you employ the Socratic method, or not, in your parenting? 

I just had this vision of me dressed like Socrates and my kids responding to my questions with the polite reverence of many of the characters in Plato’s dialogues. It’s a wonderful image, but definitely not a reality in our house. I do, though, think that writing this book helped me become a better parent in various ways. For one, it made me—oddly enough—more appreciative of lies, especially the lies we tell in childhood, and how helpful those lies are for understanding who we are and what this world means.

I was taught a pretty simplistic version of truth as a kid, which was, essentially, “Don’t lie!” But lying is also a form of invention. It’s fiction-making. And imagination. So one thing this book has helped me with is being more nuanced, and thoughtful, in talking about variations of both truth and lies—with others but also with my kids. 

Another thing this book reminded me to do with my kids is ask more questions—especially specific, thoughtful ones. We had a friend in Texas who always asked her kids “Who cried today?” and “Who laughed today?” instead of just “How was your day?” We try to do that, with some variations, when we pick the kids up from school, and it always opens up the most interesting discussions.

We also do this thing at dinnertime that I picked up from another friend (who I think learned it while growing up in the LDS church?) called “Good News Minute.” Each of us gets a moment at dinner to respond to the question: what was the single most wonderful moment of your day? We’ve add “Bad News Minute” as an option as well, because life is not just a series of joyous moments. 

Part of what this book is about is the power of teaching, for better and worse. How has the thinking you’ve done about how influential teachers can be to open up minds and also harm people at impressionable ages changed your own approach to teaching?

I’d say that this book has reminded me to teach toward wonder. Sometimes we can get bogged down in the practical stuff: do my students know the difference between memoir and the essay and literary journalism? Do they understand how to submit their work to literary magazines? Do they understand how to write a scene or use dialogue tags?

All that stuff is important, but what’s most important is to be emotionally and intellectually moved by what you read and by the discussions about what you read. Socrates said that wonder is the first step toward becoming a philosopher, but he also said that the response to wonder is silence.

So as strange as it sounds, I am often looking for ways to silence my students: readings or questions that will make them stop, at least for a second, and really consider what they know or think or feel.

Some readings that I’ve seen do this include Lacy Johnson’s The Other Side, Vauhini Vara’s essay “Ghosts,” and Jorie Graham’s poem “Poem,” among many others. 

Of course, the caveat to all this, is that you also have to figure out ways to bring students out of those moments of silence or confusion that accompany wonder. I think one way to do that is to create a classroom that feels like a community, and to be vulnerable myself as a teacher, but also to share “power” with my students so there is not this sense of me, the teacher, being all knowing, and them being the lost lambs in the wilderness.

We’re all lost in the wilderness, I think. But the wilderness can be an exciting and gorgeous and inspiring place in which to be lost, as long as you feel safe and protected while we’re there. 

I LOLed at your fantastical portrayal of Plato as a really hot guy. Fuck, marry, kill on the philosophers mentioned in the book. 

I LOLed at this question! I haven’t been asked it in years—and definitely not about philosophers. I always used to have the hardest time with the killing question, because it’s difficult for me to imagine killing anyone, even as a thought experiment. But… if I had to choose, I suppose I would kill Schopenhauer—in part because I didn’t read as much from him for the book, and so I grew less close to him as a thinker, and in part because it seems like he was actually pretty miserable anyway. I would marry Hannah Arendt, because she was brilliant and irreverent and seem like she would have been funny. And I’d fuck Plato. Socrates, I would hug, or snuggle—after he took a bath, that is!

---

What a delight, right? We have donated to the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in honor of Sarah’s labor.

You can order her book here. It’s a good read in the wilderness, for sure.