Lies
You can hear them. Can’t you?
A lie tastes bitter on the tongue. Like the last gulp of mucus at the tail end of a cold. When I tell a lie – a good old pants-on-fire falsehood – a thin splinter of myself sheers off and drops mercilessly into the abyss.
Not all lies are bad ones. It’s not their fault they taste the way they do. Some are pleasantly sugar-coated. Others are inexplicable for their pettiness. A (now very much ex-)friend once lied about the date of her birthday to save face with other, wealthier friends. Sometimes status is more compelling than a simple act of correction. What the lie usefully informed me, though, was that her commitment to social standing was more pervasive than her attention to fact. Or to me, for that matter.
I used to be good at lying. If one could award prizes for self-concealment, I’d win the Derby. I was an excellent pretender. I fashioned a personality to suit everyone I met. I got so good (bad) at reading people for what lies they needed that eventually my tiny circuitry fused and gave out, unable for a moment longer to parse and then act upon the thousand contradictory signals emanating from colleagues and acquaintances.
My honesty has got me into plenty trouble. But at least it has only got me into scrapes with other people, and not myself.
Which is not to say that I am not a dissimulator. Like everyone else I have fibbed and invented via a million tiny banalities. But the lies of self-betrayal are the biggest shards to fall from that sheer cliff.
Lies have been on my mind this week. Not least because of the explosive news in certain quarters of the UK publishing industry, where it’s been alleged that an author who’s sold millions of copies of her books was economical with truths about finances, generosity, and her husband’s terminal illness – all key elements of the bestselling memoirs she has gone on to publish. I won’t rehearse the details here, since other memoirists like Sophie Heawood and Wendy Pratt and Lily Dunn have written much more eloquently about it. The author herself has written an extensive rebuttal on her website.
I say other memoirists as if I were one too. I don’t know that I am. I write about myself sometimes, as a form of inner listening that teaches me something new. Though I’ve consumed the writing of Chantal Akerman, Annie Ernaux and Simone de Beauvoir with voracious appetite, I’ve dabbled in Rachel Cusk and adored Maggie Nelson’s magical Bluets (a book much finer, I think, than her very successful The Argonauts), obsessed over Rebecca Solnit and James Baldwin and Joan Didion and Barry Lopez and bell hooks and Roxane Gay and Celia Paul and Alexis Pauline Gumbs and adrienne maree brown, I’m not altogether sure how much of this counts as memoir. I love the contemporary blends of nature writing and self-writing like those of Polly Atkin, Marchelle Farrell, and Nina Mingya Powles and I love their ancestors – Jamaica Kincaid and Nan Shepherd. And yet still, I don’t know what memoir is. Lily Dunn knows. Abigail Thomas knows. I do not.
I especially and particularly don’t know how to define the relationship between memoir, imagination, confabulation and truth.
But I do know when someone is lying to me. I may not, often do not know why. The milk-sour drip of the lie remains. Because it is always there. People lie all the time: to themselves, to others. Lying is as often an act of self-preservation as self-abandonment. So why do some lies matter more than others?
A better question might be: why does it matter that the truth is knotty and complicated rather than straightforward? It strikes me that if you want to tell a story using the simplest of rags-to-riches story arcs, then your version of the truth needs to be both undeviating and watertight. I’ve never known truth to work like that.
Truth is uncertain until it is grossly perverted; even then the persistent assertion of an untruth (like for example the recently re-emerged term ‘biological woman’, which has no credible basis in biology) starts to seep out into wider culture so that it becomes accepted as if it were truth. A lie gains widespread acceptance as a form of reality.
It’s still a lie. But it’s truth-flavoured. Because it makes things simple.
Rather than dwell on what is true or not (what is truth but a resonance that your body affirms?) I would rather talk about justice.
Anyone who has had any kind of contact with the law, the legal system, or the courts, will know that law and justice dwell very far apart. Law appears to be predicated upon truth, and yet lies are abundant in courts and tribunals and panels and legal documents. Justice is rarely served by any legal judgement. And yet there is some pervasive faith, still, that law will uphold justice, when the truth is often so far from that. Take the verdict on the treatment of Child Q, where the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) failed to acknowledge that structural racism lay at the heart of what emboldened police officers to strip-search a young Black girl at school in 2020 with flagrant disregard for her rights and protections. There is no justice in a system that refuses to acknowledge truth. To acknowledge embodied truth. The truth of justice at work.
The accusation of lying, of being a liar, is also and equally as much a part of the heinous logic of degeneracy, a foundational principle both of early 19th century criminology and eugenics and origin, among other things, of fascism’s dehumanising forces. To be called a liar is to designate a person – or, more likely, an ethnicity, a race, a gender, a social position of indigence or statelessness or disablement – as inherently lacking in truth. Truth is wielded as a political act; the absence of it a justification for oppression and criminalisation – unless of course you are the one holding the power. In her essay Truth and Politics (1967) the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote: “‘truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.” Interrogating the lie, listening to it to hear what it is made of, tells what claims are being made, by whom, and for what ends.
Listening to lies, though. Listening tells you a lot. The flow of a lie, its form and structure, what it presses against, what facts it ignores or elides, the politics it embraces, its cogency and alliance with the classical story arcs that are the oldest forms of storytelling: the act of listening to lies tells you much about the bigger picture. Lies of commission move faster than truths; lies of omission force you to dwell in the muddiness, to extricate one fragile thread and follow it.
The best investigative journalism follows that thread to its root; interrogates the bigger structural picture that leads to the eruption of falsehood at the other end. That is rarely the result of one individual, but rather the system and structure that empowers the person to tell the whoppers, to cover up the discomfort, to evade the responsibility, to shred the documents, to avoid, evade, equivocate, hedge, fudge, stonewall, gaslight.
All good writers know that they are liars. They also know they are truthtellers. Justice is what guides them in between.
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Read: Where do I begin? I can’t really tell you what to read this month. Take your pick of the glorious memoirs I’ve mentioned above. On the fiction side this month I am being torn apart by Toni Morrison’s Beloved, horrified by Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, and perverted by Miranda July’s All Fours.
See: Feminist film organisation Cinenova are holding a screening from their digitised video collections at the London BFI Southbank next Thursday 17 July. Tickets are available here.
I’m a huge fan of Palestinian sculptor-filmmaker Jumana Manna’s work, and her tender, piercing film FORAGERS is currently screening at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton. Stay tuned for a substack post about it.
Do: If you would like to be part of an organisation that is designed to engender community-led healing, you might like to attend some of Healing Justice London’s programmes and events. If you would like to support organisations that advocate for systemic change and the eradication of structural racism in policing, education, health and social care, you might consider donating to one of the following organisations: Operation Black Vote, Sista Space and the Runnymede Trust.