The Assay Interview Project: Sarah Viren
October 21, 2024
Sarah Viren is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of two books of nonfiction. Her essay collection Mine won the River Teeth Book Prize and the GLCA New Writers Award and was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her memoir To Name the Bigger Lie was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and an NPR and LitHub book of the year and shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and a National Magazine Award Finalist, Viren teaches in the creative writing program at Arizona State University.
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About To Name the Bigger Lie: In To Name the Bigger Lie, Sarah Viren tells the story of an all-too-real investigation into her personal and professional life that she expands into a profound exploration of the nature of truth. The memoir begins as Viren researches what she believes will be a book about her high school philosophy teacher, a charismatic instructor who taught her and her classmates to question everything—eventually, even the reality of historical atrocities. As she digs into the effects of his teachings, her life takes a turn into the fantastical when her wife, Marta, is notified that she’s being investigated for sexual misconduct at the university where they both teach. An incisive journey into honesty and betrayal, this memoir explores the powerful pull of dangerous conspiracy theories and the pliability of personal narratives in a world dominated by hoaxes and fakes.
Julija Šukys: Sarah, congratulations on your book, To Name the Bigger Lie. Like so many others (a million readers, it seems?), I read the original New York Times Magazine article, “The Accusations Were Lies. But Could We Prove It?” (March 18, 2020) with both fascination and horror back in the early days of our pandemic isolation. For readers who are unfamiliar with that piece, can you give a potted version of the events you describe there?
Sarah Viren: It’s funny but, even though I’ve told this story a number of times—first to friends and family in the moment, then in the magazine story, and later in the book—I still sometimes find myself at a loss as to how to summarize it. But I’ll give it a try: In 2019, I was offered what felt like my dream job: a tenure-track job teaching creative nonfiction at the University of Michigan. It was a dream job because of the institution but also the place. My wife Marta and I met in Iowa City and we both like the Midwest and saw it as the perfect place to raise our two kids. We hoped we could move there as a family and, after I was offered the job, we were waiting to hear if the University of Michigan could also offer Marta what is called a “spousal hire” in academia. The wait took longer than we expected and, during that time, we found out that someone had been anonymously posting about Marta on Reddit, saying she had sexually harassed her students. Then we found out that someone had reported Marta for similar conduct to our university. An investigation was opened, first into Marta and then into me (I was later accused of sexual misconduct as well). Then both the search for a spousal hire for Marta and my job offer were put on hold at the University of Michigan because, as we found out, the University of Michigan had also received emails about Marta, and me. The person emailing and posting about Marta was pretending to be at least two different female students at our university, Arizona State University. But in the end, after the investigation drew out for weeks, and after it became too late for the University of Michigan to find any sort of job for Marta, we discovered that it was actually someone I knew, a man I call “J” in the magazine story and “Jay” in the book. He was an acquaintance who was also up for the job in Michigan and who had reached out to me when he heard I’d been offered the job and asked if I would take it. Not thinking anything of his question, I’d told him that I would take the job as long as the University of Michigan could offer Marta a spousal hire as well. The following day, we learned from documents we later subpoenaed, he opened up a yahoo account and began emailing people in Michigan claiming to be a student of Marta’s named “Rebecca.” Thank you! It’s a wild and chilling story… The book, of course, goes beyond the scope of the original article. To Name the Bigger Lie examines questions of truth, lies, and conspiracy. On the one hand, you write about the breathtaking lengths to which Jay – an academic rival who you thought was an ally – went to sabotage your job offer at the University of Michigan. On the other, you contemplate the teaching style and curious pedagogical choices of your high-school Theory of Knowledge teacher. The course is a kind of intro to philosophy or epistemology (my son has just finished his first year of it), and it asks students to consider questions of what we know and how we know it. The two histories – those of Jay and Dr. Whiles, as you call your teacher in the book – are distinct. Whereas Jay engages in overt deception, the case of Dr. Whiles is muddier. He presents both homophobic and Holocaust-denying materials to the class, and it’s unclear for much of the book where he stands on these issues. Is he, in fact, a Holocaust denier or not? A conspiracy theorist or “just asking questions,” as the phrase goes? How do you see these two tales as interconnected? How does Jay help us understand Dr. Whiles and vice versa? As I note in the prologue, the book itself started in 2016. I had just given birth to our second child and we as a country had just elected a new president, Donald J. Trump. I was interested in understanding Trump’s draw to voters, which I saw firsthand in West Texas, where we were living at the time. I didn’t buy the argument that only uneducated white male voters were taken in by him. I knew, from my experience with Dr. Whiles, how easy it is for very smart, well-educated people to get taken in by a charismatic and persuasive storyteller. Because both Trump and Dr. Whiles (and Jay) are and were storytellers—along with being liars (in their individual ways). When Jay entered my life three years later, in 2019, I realized that the feeling his lies and manipulations evoked in me were, at a corporeal level, at least, quite similar to the feelings I’d had in high school, when Dr. Whiles was spinning all these stories of conspiracy theories that he presented as true, or possibly true. So, the project of the book became this: sorting through that feeling, the feeling of being trapped in someone else’s lies, which is a feeling I think almost all of us have had at least once, if not multiple times, in our lives, but that those who are disenfranchised and disempowered face much more often. My question was: what does that feel like? And how do you move past that feeling? How do you get out from under the thumb of someone else’s storytelling? The similarities in Dr. Whiles’ and Jay’s stories were helpful in that regard. I was also interested in bringing some nuance to our discussions of truth and lies, and the differences between the two men helped me in that regard. I think one of our worst instincts, politically and at an interpersonal level, is to act as if all forms of deceit are the same. Jay is not the same as Dr. Whiles and neither men are the same as Trump—nor are any of them are the same as Socrates, another storyteller-manipulator who I turn to sometimes in the book. In that way, the book both compares Dr. Whiles and Jay at times and juxtaposes them in other instances in my larger quest to tell a story of reckoning with lies and better understanding the ramifications of truth and truth-telling. I enjoyed the reported sections of the book enormously. The early passages about Jay have a riveting detective-story quality. And the parts about Dr. Whiles are thoughtful and searching, relying on conversations and interviews with former classmates, visits to your old stomping grounds in Florida, and finally, on correspondence with Dr. Whiles himself. Such human and real-world research lends texture and energy to creative nonfiction. It forces us to confront the flaws of our own memories and to consider how time changes both places and people, including ourselves. Can you talk a bit about the reporting you did? Which experiences left a particular mark on you or your work? I knew from the beginning that I wanted this to be a researched and reported memoir. For the Dr. Whiles story, I wanted to better understand what my fellow classmates and former teachers remembered about the past and how they interpret it now. Talking to them was probably the most informative. Their memories helped fill in (and in some cases contest) mine, and their interpretations of the past gave me new tools for understanding Dr. Whiles and my experiences with him. One of my interviews with a former classmate, for instance, gave me the language of “stakes,” as in who has stakes in a story being told truthfully and who isn’t as comparably harmed by the ripple effects of racist or antisemitic or homophobic conspiracy theories. This friend, a white cis male and a Christian, said he’d realized that he just didn’t have stakes in Dr. Whiles’ manipulations the way I did, because I grew up queer, or the student I call Gayle in the book did, because she was a Jewish immigrant, or other students in our magnet program who were Black did. That notion of “stakes” eventually became a leitmotif in the narrative, one that I now see as key to moving toward an ending of the narrative. Researching and reporting on the Jay story was helpful in different ways. With that story I had far fewer holes to fill (or check) when it comes to memory, but I also had so much documentation: all the emails sent to my university or to the University of Michigan about Marta and me, emails that I gathered and read and put into order. All of Jay’s social media posts, and later some of the emails and texts he sent to colleagues and friends that were shared with me (as well as the Reddit posts about him, which he most likely posted himself). His machinations were so frequent, frenzied, and complicated that I had to draw a timeline to understand where he was when and what his two main avatars (“Jessica” and “Rebecca”) were saying about Marta or me on which date. The fact that Marta and I decided to file a defamation lawsuit after we realized what was happening also proved fortuitous—both for the final outcome in our Title IX investigation and for my ability to write about all of it after the fact. That lawsuit brought in a number of documents related to the email accounts used to defame us, and I then had to line that data up with all the other information about Jay I had to get the clearest picture possible of the order of events. Meanwhile, I was talking to people who knew Jay: where he was when; what he had said about Marta and me; what he was acting like, etc. I think the biggest challenge amid all that documentation and information was making space for the story, for the indelible moments of fear or doubt. It was comparably easy to try to pin down Jay’s lies; it was much harder to write into those moments in which his lies had frightened or disoriented me. I want to touch on the question of dialogues. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (itself written in the form of a dialogue) forms a thread that stretches the length of the book. We see many examples of dialogues or conversations in To Name the Bigger Lie: between you and Jay, you and Marta, you and Dr. Whiles, with friends from high school, with the Title IX investigator, and even an imagined dialogue with Lemmy the tortoise. The classic idea of the dialogue is that it’s a means to get closer to the truth. Is that still true in our age of conspiracy theories, lies, and disinformation? Having come to the end of this book where have you landed? Have you arrived at a place of hope or despair? I think dialogue and storytelling are two of the best options we have if we want to imagine a better future, but that doesn’t mean I have hope we will, unfortunately. Part of my goal in the fourth section of the book (which is written in dialogue form) was to offer a counter to the ending of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” which is also a story told in four parts. In the ending of the allegory, Plato (writing in the voice of Socrates) imagines a world in which only a select few people know “the truth” while everyone else is content to believe lies. It’s a pessimistic and frankly elitist understanding of humankind, one that argues that we will only have a just society, a utopia, if we allow the learned elite to rule while everyone else wallows in ignorance. I spent the first three parts of my book using stories, true stories (researched stories!) as a means of thinking through and talking about both truth and lies at a micro and macro level. In that fourth and final part, I wanted to think about those questions differently, with dialogue. In writing in dialogue, I found I was able to think about Dr. Whiles and Jay but also about the larger concerns of the book differently than when I had been writing in essay mode or narrative mode earlier in the book. Dialogues, both real (as they were with Dr. Whiles) and imagined (as with Lemmy the tortoise), forced me as a writer and storyteller to confront others, other opinions, other perspectives and that challenge inevitably led to changes in my thinking. Dialogue also puts me and my readers together, in the present tense, in the same imagined space. There can be danger in dialogue and in sharing space (Socrates imagines violence if people in the allegorical cave actually try engage with what is real and what is made up, for instance), but there is also the possibility of community-building, of realizing that we all share stakes in this world. Ending the book as I did has been the source of a lot of questions and, in some cases, consternation, but also some beautiful interpretative readings from readers. I didn’t mean for the use of dialogues to be hopeful necessarily because I know how difficult conversations and dialogue are in “real” life, but I did want to end in a way that, instead of offering answers or resolution, would conjure up a shared space, one in which readers could (and have) reacted in a variety of ways. Dialogue is messy and unpredictable, but it’s vital to our “real” life existence and, in my book, it felt like a necessary addition, both aesthetically and ethically. I want to talk about Virginia Woolf’s concept of I now/I then. It’s a bedrock concept to anyone doing work that engages memory, whether memoir or essay. Your book reminded me that it’s perhaps a more interesting and complex concept than we teachers of creative nonfiction give it credit for. It’s not only about observing past versions of ourselves but also about “the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what Belongs to what; making a character come together” (Woolf qtd. 236). And not just pleasure, she continues, but the shock of seeing how things fit together. Tell me about your experience of both pleasure and shock in writing this book. Yes! This was a key discovery for me as well, in rereading Woolf’s essay “A Sketch of the Past.” Just as the concept of “having stakes” became a leitmotif in the book, so too did this idea of a “shock.” Woolf’s understanding of the shock is similar, I think, to what Joan Didion called the “shimmering images” she felt compelled to write into and out of, or what Richard Hugo has called “triggering towns,” those real images or real-world obsessions that “trigger” the language of a poem. What each of these concepts shares is the logic of and impetus for imaginative writing, no matter the genre. We have words, the basic building blocks we are all working with, but we also have images and moments and memories that, for whatever reason, are weighted in a way that the rest of the “cotton wool” (again, Woolf’s term) of time and experience just isn’t. In writing so much about what is real and true and what is false and fake in this book, I had moments where I started to feel overburdened by the nitty gritty details of that real-world exercise. What Woolf’s essay helped me remember (along with some of Hannah Arendt’s writing about Plato’s thoughts on the “shock” of philosophical awareness) is that our brief brushes with truth can be a transcendent experience. It’s an experience we don’t quite understand but that we write into in order to see more clearly. It’s the source of all our writing, I think: this desire to describe more clearly our brief encounters with, as Arendt put it, “that which is as it is.” Finally, let’s talk about ethical choices. You had to weigh many decisions about how and why to protect people’s identities in this book. You write about changing the identities of Dr. Whiles and Jay for legal and ethical reasons. Other characters in the book appear as themselves: Marta, your kids, your friend Inara (whom I also know!) – and I imagine some of your colleagues. Can you talk about the how you sorted through such decisions? Do you give loved ones a chance to vet what you write about them? What legal advice or direction did you receive from the press or others as to what could appear in print? As I mention in book’s Afterword, I hired a fact checker for the book, so she checked the facts in everyone’s stories with them directly and I corrected any errors or mistakes they identified. I also let my friend whom I call “Lara” read the book in its entirety before it was published and, of course, I talked a lot with Marta about what I wanted to include or exclude regarding our shared story. I changed Jay’s and Dr. Whiles’ names for legal reasons (the press hired a lawyer to vet the book as well and she suggested that I change a couple of Dr. While’s small identifying markers, and I agreed to that, too). I also made those changes because I didn’t want readers to try to track down Dr. Whiles and figure out who he is in real life. I mention in the book how disheartening it was for me to watch as people online went after Jay once his real name was exposed—not because I think his name should be secret (it shouldn’t!) but because those efforts fell so dramatically short of what real justice would have looked like in my mind. I didn’t want to see a repeat of that with Dr. Whiles. Lastly, though I wanted to reach out to Jay directly and try to have a dialogue with him, I didn’t attempt that because Marta asked me not to. She lived through so much via our experience with Jay, and I felt I needed to respect her opinion in that regard. So, though the fact checker reached out to Jay, I never have reached out to him myself—and, if there is one regret I have about the book, it’s that I never tried to talk to him. And yet those kinds of compromises are the ones we have to make when we write about the real world and about real people we love in that world. I’ve made peace with that. Do Jay and Dr. Whiles look different to you now that you’ve completed this journey? I have compassion for both Jay and Dr. Whiles. I always have and I do more so after writing about them. But I also have a better understanding of my anger at them. Learning that Dr. Whiles hurt others, for instance, put my own hurt and confusion in a larger context, and that has been enormously helpful in reckoning with the past. Writing about Jay, and hearing so many others react to my initial sharing of that story, has allowed me to see him and his effect on our lives more clearly. I still feel for him as a person, but I also now know that he hurt a number of other male students before he hurt me and Marta, and learning that made me far angrier than when I thought he had only harmed the two of us. I don’t know if I forgive either man, because neither has asked me to forgive them, but I see them as fallible human beings, people who, like me, had childhoods and have moved imperfectly into their individual adulthoods. I am angry at them and I also hold out hope that they will one day reckon with the way they’ve harmed me and others. I try to allow space for both those feelings to exist. Julija Šukys is Assay's Associate Editor and the author of three books (Silence is Death, Epistolophilia, and Siberian Exile), one book-length translation (And I burned with shame), and of many essays. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and, in Fall 2022, held the Fulbright Canada Research Chair at York University in Toronto.
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