To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories
(Scribner, $28)
With her new book, essayist Sarah Viren “has pulled off a magic trick of fantastic proportion,” said Melissa Holbrook Pierson in The Washington Post. While unspooling two personal stories that would be worth reading for their suspense alone, Viren works in probing reflections on the malleability of young minds, Plato, the pitfalls of memory, and an issue that should be “of burning concern to every American”: how we know what is true.
Two liars figure prominently in the book, said Kristen Martin in NPR.org. The first was Viren’s charismatic high school philosophy teacher, who taught his 1990s students to question everything, then began spreading bigotry and dangerous conspiracy theories, including that the Holocaust never happened. Viren had already been working on a book about this teacher when her wife, another tenure-track professor, was falsely accused of sexually harassing students, triggering lengthy investigations that eventually confirmed the lies were initiated by a male peer who was trying to derail Viren’s career. Viren recounted that episode in a “gripping” 2020 New York Times Magazine story that attracted a million readers. Like that essay, To Name the Bigger Lie “has the page-turning quality of a thriller.” But even once the author and her readers know the outcomes of the book’s central tales, “what remains to be unraveled is why both men lied, what to do about their lies, and how to live in a world where the barrier between fact and fiction is so flimsy.”
In her pursuit of truth, Viren doesn’t just call out blatant deceivers, said John Warner in the Chicago Tribune. When she interviews former classmates about their memories of the philosophy teacher, they provide such varied accounts of the past that “in some cases she comes away recognizing that she fundamentally misremembers her own life.” That’s startling, because she also reminds us that our memories define us, shaping our understanding of how to navigate the world. In recent days, “I’ve found myself haunted by what Viren reveals not just about her life, but all our lives.”