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Sarah Viren’s new book, To Name the Bigger Lie, pushes us to re-examine what it means to tell the truth, one gorgeous sentence at a time. The two narratives—one of her high school humanities teacher and his tendency towards conspiracy theories—and the other, a piece about a false Title IX complaint against her wife originally published in the New York Times Magazine, ask the reader to make sense of an increasingly murky world. The author of MINE, longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, sat down to talk to me via Zoom recently.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Emily Maloney
Tell me about the experience of publishing To Name the Bigger Lie. It’s so exciting to see the buzz about it.
Sarah Viren
It’s almost like having a first book, because my first book was a collection. I really liked working with the press, but it didn’t get out in time to be reviewed, so there was no publicity. And so then this is the opposite because it’s a lot. I mean—not a lot of publicity. But there’s a lot of lead up, right? There’s a whole process to it, which is a good thing. I’m not sure. I don’t know how you felt about it. But I don’t know if it’s really suited to my personality.
Emily Maloney
Do you have anxiety around the book launch? I just wanted to drop mine into a black hole somewhere.
Sarah Viren
I think I have anxiety about it being read not the way that I hope it would be read, of it being a mismatch, and how it’s marketed versus what I think it is. And so I’m worried about people basically being dissatisfied customers. I wouldn’t feel bad about myself; I don’t think it’s my fault. Because I like my book! But I think my book might be different. And I think [it’s in part] because of having an article/essay first. I was joking with my friend Lina that The New York Times won’t let you call it an essay. I started calling it an article even though it was really an essay. But I worry that people are expecting a bigger version of that. A fatter, more padded version of that.
Emily Maloney
It’s such a page-turner! It absolutely fits the bill as a literary thriller. Can we talk about going from essay to book? I feel like since you’ve got two stories here, it’s so much more nuanced and complex. How did you put it together?
Sarah Viren
I knew, during the experience of the Jay story, that I wanted them to be told together, because there was a visceral feeling I had during the Jay experience. People say “gaslit,” though I’m annoyed how a word like gaslit simplifies an experience. I think it’s that feeling of being trapped by lies in a way that feels sort of scary and makes you doubt yourself. And then I remembered Dr. Whiles, I remembered feeling very similar in my body and in my head. I’d been writing the Dr. Whiles book, and then Jay happened. After I wrote the story, there was a lot of interest in me just writing an expanded version. I think we could have easily sold a book that would have been more about Title IX, and this complication with me too, and a more nonfiction book that digs into those issues I felt were already explained in the article. I was not interested in doing a longer version of that. I started looking for agents before the New York Times piece was published. In the interim, I sent out the first part that I had about Dr. Whiles, and the Jay part. At that point, I didn’t know how they were going to go together. There was a lot of interest with just the Jay story. Matt [McGowan] was really the most enthusiastic about the Dr. Whiles story. He loved it for all the reasons that I like it. And then he was really helpful trying to find editors who would like it too, which was also harder.
Emily Maloney
Did your editor help shape the manuscript early-on, and what was that process like?
Sarah Viren
Sally Howe accepted it on proposal, but then I had a year to get together the whole manuscript. I didn’t want to braid the stories, I wanted that feeling of interruption that existed in real life. But it was only in that process of writing that I started to think through the idea of there being these four parts, like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. And then I realized, oh, I want this book to be in conversation with the allegory in a structural way. That came on my own in the writing process. When I sent it to my editor, structurally, it was all there, but the part that needed the most thought and work was the last part, figuring out how to make that work.
Emily Maloney
I’m really curious how the end came together. There are lots of epistolary novels; I feel like I see it less in nonfiction. And I was wondering, it’s such a sharp departure from the other sections of the book, which are much more matter-of-fact. There’s something so exciting about those final sections. How did they materialize?
Sarah Viren
I had this self-funded writing residency, because it was during the pandemic, where we rented this house. And I knew that I needed to be alone in order to figure out what to do at the end. It was hard; during the pandemic, I was with my wife and kids all the time, and there was just no brain space to be able to think creatively about how this would end. I started thinking about dialogues, because I was thinking about Plato’s Republic, and Plato in general. And I did the first dialogue, where I imagined Jay in Dr. Whiles’s class, and it was so satisfying. I realized why it’s satisfying; when you’re a nonfiction writer, you can’t change things. Well, you can. But if you do it, you’re deceitfully changing things, because you’re changing things so that the story reads how you want it to read, but you’re not doing it in a transparent way. Normally, if you make any changes to nonfiction texts, it has to do with aesthetic considerations. I mean, this was transparent. I liked the idea of writing these dialogues. And the fact that I could think through them, I could figure out what I was feeling or thinking by putting in motion a sort of fictional interaction. Once I had those, I started writing to Dr. Whiles. And so then I had his emails to me and my emails to him, I suddenly realized it makes sense to address the reader.
Emily Maloney
There’s a maturity in this book. Not that your first book wasn’t, but there’s this shift that occurs between MINE and this one, where the reader realizes this is the Sarah who writes for The New York Times Magazine. This voice is really cool and knowledgeable, a different, embodied self where you present yourself as an authority. But at the same time, you’re still willing to mess with form, which made me really excited. I thought, oh, this is fun.
Sarah Viren
In some ways, I feel like the book, except for the last part, is more traditional than MINE. I think that endings are so important, and that it’s so important to surprise people. I don’t know if it’s harder with a novel, but that was one thing I thought about a lot. I didn’t want to do something new just for the sake of doing a new thing, but I also wanted to go somewhere else. There needs to be some sort of turn, and it was so satisfying to land on a turn that makes sense.
Emily Maloney
How did you approach the essential questions in the book? Structurally and also thematically? It feels like it’s loaded with Easter eggs.
Sarah Viren
Yeah, I’m kind of a fan of Easter eggs. Because you have all the things you’re doing in the book, and maybe nobody will ever know. And that’s okay. I think I was collecting shadow texts that would be helpful for me, not in a systematic way, but a subconscious way. And what I was thinking as I was writing was, Okay, can I start to tell these stories and have these shadow texts anchoring the telling of it? And is there a way that I can be in conversation with them as I go forward?
Emily Maloney
The idea of collective telling is something that seems really present, right? Because not only do we get to know all the people who took this class with you and your friend group, what that was like at that time, but also there’s the fact that you try and track down some of these people. The journalism part of your brain is saying, Let’s see who we can find to make a comment about this.
Sarah Viren
It’s interesting when people talk about the healing process of writing. I have never really felt that writing is healing. But I do think it helps me logically; it helps me articulate what I think. It’s about being able to make sense of things. I feel there were some interviews, like two in particular from high school that felt significant, but one was this guy that used to joke about me being gay, but he was a friend. And when I told him everything about Dr. Whiles, he recognized that was the truth, even though he didn’t remember it. And he grappled with the fact that he had forgotten it. He was the one who gave me this language when he said, I realized that I didn’t have stakes in the story the way you did. It just really helped me. It made me think: I have the language of having stakes in a story; what does it mean to have stakes in a story? It’s the people or the experiences, or whatever it is in writing, that gives you the language to be able to grapple with whatever you’re grappling with, but it doesn’t feel healing. It doesn’t feel emotional. It feels to me very intellectual, even though it’s emotional content, it feels like I’m figuring out what this means and how to talk about it.
Emily Maloney
Being a young queer person is a lot of work. And I think that comes through in the book in a really exciting way. I think I’m a few years younger than you, but the work of having to navigate one’s sexuality as a teenager can make a complicated time of life much more complicated, especially in the ’90s and early 2000s. And there are ways in which you address that with particular thoughtfulness and nuance and sensitivity and a clarity of vision that I really appreciated. And your eye for detail is fantastic.
Sarah Viren
I’m not a memoirist. I felt like the sustained focus on high school [in the book] was hard. Because it doesn’t feel like it’s my instinct. I think that it was very hard to go back to being in that space. It was easy for me to think about Dr. Whiles; I had so many things I’d written in his class. This fellow student happened to also be gay, and didn’t come out until later. Talking to her was really helpful because I had totally forgotten. I hadn’t thought about how our Spanish teacher died of HIV/AIDS and the way that was sugar coated, saying he died of cancer. And, that made me think about how Dr. Whiles would talk about AIDS like this conspiracy and all these ways in which coming out was complicated by the politics of the ’90s. Even though you were a bit later, I think that you also grew up somewhere that wasn’t a big city. You weren’t in the south, but in a less metropolitan place.
Emily Maloney
Yeah, there was no Gay-Straight Alliance. At one point someone put posters up to start a GSA, and within 20 minutes, all the posters had been removed or vandalized, in the entire school. It felt dangerous. There’s that whole don’t ask, don’t tell vibe that trickled down into the culture where no one was going to talk about any of this. And even though we were far removed from the Reagan era of HIV, there was a lot of anxiety.
Sarah Viren
Yeah, yeah. Though I have to say, I just read Rebecca Makkai’s new novel, I Have Some Questions For You. It’s a novel, but the character goes back to high school and talks to all these people. She always felt like she was an outsider, but they thought she was “too cool for school,” and a similar thing happened to me when I started talking to people—
Emily Maloney
Oh my god, me too.
Sarah Viren
That’s what I was wondering, because I think you feel like a reject, you were picked on, and of course we remember those moments in which we feel ostracized, but a lot of people were like, “I thought you were too cool for us.” And that’s a fascinating thing about memoir. There is this real disconnect; you start to see yourself. You can see that you were a completely different person. When we just rely on memory, it feels like it’s a continuum: I was 17. Now, I’m 44 or whatever. But especially when you research a memoir, rather than just relying on memory…. And I think relying on memory makes a lot of sense; I just wanted to do some of that research. It did start to feel like, “I can see that girl. I don’t know who she is; she feels totally foreign to me.” And it was helpful to have other people read the book, like Kerry [Howley] read the book. And she said, “I didn’t realize until part of the way through that you were as earnest as you were, because you come off as so badass.” I was really intent on figuring out what was true and what the world meant. There’s a purity of thought, where you haven’t figured out nuance, and so I think the work of memoir is very interesting, being able to recapture and understand that person, and see them as that naïve version of yourself.
Emily Maloney
It’s very therapy-talk, be kind to your inner child or whatever. You have to be kind to that person. Because if you’re not compassionate, then readers get mad at you.
Sarah Viren
Yeah, I think you have to be compassionate. But I feel I am compassionate with everybody, and readers sometimes get mad at me about that. There are people who told me they’re frustrated with the Jay story. They thought I was too nice to him. And then some people who have read this book have felt like I was too understanding of Dr. Whiles. It’s the way I see the world. I used to say that I had an empathy problem. I just over-empathize with people. And I think as writers we have to lean into our works. And one of my strengths is that I can see things from other people’s perspectives pretty easily, because then it makes me forgive people more than I should. But writing wise, that’s one of the quirks of how I see the world, so I have to lean into it rather than be ashamed of it. I’m owning whatever is quirky or weird about my way of seeing the world.
NONFICTION
To Name the Bigger Lie
By Sarah Viren
Scribner Book Company
Published June 13, 2023
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