A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

by Peter Ho Davies

Overview

A People 10 Best Books of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • An Independent (UK) 20 Best Books of the Year

"Wise, bracingly honest...A reassuring reality check...Exhilarating." —New York Times Book Review

A heartbreaking, soul-baring novel about the repercussions of choice that “will strike a resonant chord with parents everywhere,” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) from the award-winning author of The Welsh Girl and The Fortunes

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself traces the complex consequences of one of the most personal yet public, intimate yet political decisions a family can make: to have a child, and conversely, to choose not to have a child. A first pregnancy is interrupted by test results at once catastrophic and uncertain. A second pregnancy ends in a fraught birth, a beloved child, the purgatory of further tests—and questions that reverberate down the years.
 
When does sorrow turn to shame?
When does love become labor?
When does chance become choice?
When does a diagnosis become destiny?
And when does fact become fiction?
 
This spare, graceful narrative chronicles the flux of parenthood, marriage, and the day-to-day practice of loving someone. As challenging as it is vulnerable, as furious as it is tender, as touching as it is darkly comic, Peter Ho Davies’s new novel is an unprecedented depiction of fatherhood.

“There are some stories that require as much courage to write as they do art. Peter Ho Davies’s achingly honest, searingly comic portrait of fatherhood is just such a story . . . The world needs more stories like this one, more of this kind of courage, more of this kind of love.” —Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award–winning author of The Friend
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780358572879
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/04/2022
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	665,847
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 6.70(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

PETER HO DAVIES’s novel, The Fortunes, won the Anisfield-Wolf Award and the Chautauqua Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is also the author of The Welsh Girl, long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and a London Times best-seller, as well as two critically acclaimed collections of short stories. His fiction has appeared in Harpers, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, and Granta and has been anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories.

Editorial Reviews

There are some stories that require as much courage to write as they do art. Peter Ho Davies’s achingly honest, searingly comic portrait of fatherhood is just such a story. A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself enacts to profound effect the dark shames, fears, and absurdities that are an inescapable part of family life. The world needs more stories like this one, more of this kind of courage, more of this kind of love.”
—Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend

“A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself is a novel about love—not fake love that blots out all else, but real-life love that, like a rose window, allows all other emotions to pass through it: guilt, shame, fury, duty, sorrow. Peter Ho Davies has written a brilliant book about modern marriage and parenthood, about choice and its fallout, that is hilarious and devastating, both true-to-life and a comforting fractured parable for our time.”
—Elizabeth McCracken, bestselling author of Bowlaway
 

"I never miss a new book by Peter Ho Davies and A Lie Someone Told You About is his best yet. A taut, raw, clever work of autofiction with a real beating heart, this is the audacious tragicomic novel about fatherhood and long-term love we’ve been missing."
—Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn and Gold Fame Citrus

"Peter Ho Davies has long written brilliantly about accidents of culpability and their winding trails. In A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself he has given us a stunning novel of family life, scrupulous and astute, full of home-truths in every sense. Another triumph by an author whose books I love."
—Joan Silber, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Improvement

"Prose as spare as it is emotionally resonant...A tribute to Davies' skill and sensitivity...A radiant conclusion affirms the daunting cost and overwhelming rewards of raising a child. Perfectly observed and tremendously moving: This will strike a resonant chord with parents everywhere.

"
—Kirkus, starred review

“A raw, intimate look at a couple’s journey into parenthood . . . a resonant treatise on identity, family, grieving, writing, and ‘the taking and telling of other people’s stories.’”
—Booklist, starred review

"Davies’s meditation on the complexities of parenthood is at once celebration and absolution, finding truth in human contradictions."
—Publishers Weekly

 

From the Publisher

10/05/2020

Davies (The Fortunes) delves into fatherhood in his thoughtful latest, intertwining musings on pregnancy, marriage, family life, and work. The unnamed narrator, a writer and creative writing professor, makes the difficult decision with his wife to terminate their pregnancy after the fetus tests positive for mosaicism and their doctor gives them a long list of potential birth defects. A subsequent successful pregnancy brings new fears over their son’s development, as the couple processes their internalized shame over the abortion and their son’s potential autism (“Abortion is shameful, because pregnancy is shameful, because sex is shameful, because periods are shameful. It almost makes me relieved we had a boy,” the wife says). Davies explores their emotions in unflinching honesty, as the narrator contends with lingering fears over getting their son tested for autism. Davies’s smooth prose and ruminations on language (a synonym for “imagine,” the narrator considers, is also “to conceive”) are the stars of this work. While an anticlimactic, philosophical conclusion somewhat undermines the narrator’s character development after he embraces his role as a father, it resonates with the key theme of paradoxes. Davies’s meditation on the complexities of parenthood is at once celebration and absolution, finding truth in human contradictions. Agent: Maria Massie, Massie & McQuilkin Literary. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

08/01/2020

In this study of the burdens of choice, a couple's first pregnancy is terminated after devastating test returns. Then a second pregnancy culminates in a difficult birth and more tests with aching consequences, as sorrow turns to shame, diagnosis to destiny, and the act of loving an everyday challenge. From Anisfield-Wolf and Chautauqua Prize winner; with a 40,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

★ 2020-10-14
Davies’ rigorously truthful examination of fatherhood explores the fallout from an abortion and the difficulties that follow a second pregnancy.

Prenatal tests suggest—but not conclusively—that something is very wrong with their unborn child, and an unnamed couple decides on an abortion. The next pregnancy proceeds normally until the baby turns blue on the delivery table and is whisked off to intensive care. Everything seems to be fine; their son comes home after four days, and they settle down to the sleep-deprived routine of life with an infant. But they panic when he cries, and when he does fall asleep, they stand outside his door listening to make sure he’s breathing. In a third-person narrative from the father’s point of view, Davies unsentimentally captures the mind-numbing tedium coupled with blinding love that new parents feel in prose as spare as it is emotionally resonant. When the boy’s preschool teacher “has concerns” even readers without children are likely to share the parents’ dread and anguish. The narrative moves briskly through key episodes: The son gets all kinds of physical and occupational therapy, the spouses go back to work (she’s at a university press, he’s a writer and teacher), their marriage is strained, the boy’s kindergarten teacher hints he might be autistic. His parents can’t bear to get him tested: “They’ve been afraid of tests for so long. All his life.” Their uncertainty over the abortion will never be resolved (references to Schrödinger’s cat abound), and the husband’s decision to volunteer as an escort at an abortion clinic infuriates his wife, who snarls, “You act like it happened to you!” It’s a tribute to Davies’ skill and sensitivity that we feel how much they still love each other despite bad sex, jealousies, and endless worry over their son. When they finally have him tested, the results are once again ambiguous, but they are learning to accept “his normal.” A radiant conclusion affirms the daunting cost and overwhelming rewards of raising a child.

Perfectly observed and tremendously moving: This will strike a resonant chord with parents everywhere.

Kirkus Reviews