Two Truths and a Lie
In my first undergraduate fiction workshop, our professor had us play Two Truths and a Lie, a game in which you share three statements about yourself and the rest of the group tries to determine which one is a lie. The idea behind the exercise was to help us figure out how to best utilize detail to make our fiction believable.
The game seems simple—until you realize most people don’t have interesting facts about themselves stored away for when a whimsical get-to-know-you game erupts. Though our class was made up of aspiring writers, we seemed to forget our imaginations entirely within the constraints of the exercise. Instead, we relied on safe, sanitized facts that didn’t reveal anything about us as people, but increased our chances of “winning” the game.
The trick was to take three boring facts about yourself and alter one just enough that it wasn’t technically true, but sounded close enough that it was undetectable as a lie. For example, I could state that I was born in Amherst, New York, when I was actually born in Buffalo. This manipulation of truth is so slight that only an already-intimate knowledge of my life would give me away.
Lying by omission, slight bends of the truth, “little white lies”—we know that players will have a hard time telling these lies from the truth, because these are the same types of lies we tell every day while maintaining our images as inherently trustworthy people. It’s strange, but most people do seem to believe that other people are always telling them the truth—at least initially. Adrienne Rich writes about this phenomenon in her 1975 essay “Women and Honour: Some Notes on Lying”:
You tell me: “In 1950 I lived on the north side of Beacon Street in Somerville.” You tell me: “She and I were lovers, but for months now we have only been good friends.” You tell me: “It is seventy degrees outside and the sun is shining.” [. . .] I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow the universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you.
One wonders: why does Rich trust this person’s account of anything? Why do we trust any person’s account of anything? We can be lied to at any time, for any reason. Of course, to acknowledge this truth would lead to social decay. Without some semblance of trust, how could we build relationships, families, communities, cities, countries, governments, economies?
One place where lying is socially acceptable—and, furthermore, expected—is in fiction. As writers, we don’t like to think of our works of fiction as lies—too much of a negative connotation. But in the most literal sense, fiction is a lie, even when it reveals essential truths. Indeed, Italian author Elena Ferrante has written that the goal of literature is “to orchestrate lies that always tell, strictly, the truth.” The trick to good fiction is telling convincing, consistent-enough lies that the artifice is either forgotten or ignored by the reader. It’s expected that writers borrow from their own lives and experiences to create more realistic fiction—or more compelling lies, whichever you prefer.
In that same fiction workshop where I played Two Truths and a Lie, I drew on my own experiences of my postpartum body to write a short story about motherhood. There were details that I wouldn’t have known to include if I hadn’t given birth to a child myself. When you’re pregnant, your abdominal muscles stretch to accommodate the baby; when there’s no baby pushing against your muscles anymore, it takes them weeks to shrink back down and firm back up. After I gave birth, my tummy felt like Jell-O. It didn’t matter if I laid down or sat up—when I pushed against my stomach my hand kept moving into my body. I felt like if I pushed far enough I’d eventually feel the soft of my internal organs. Though this bizarre bodily change wasn’t something I’d heard other mothers mention, I knew it was something they would recognize, so when I decided to write about a character uncomfortable with being a mother, I wanted to use this detail in the story.
My fiction class knew that I was a teen mother. I’d actually used that as one of my two truths, assuming people wouldn’t believe it. They did, without hesitation. I tried not to think too hard about why. When I workshopped that story, my peers talked about how realistic the character was, how her pain and anger toward her husband and child were palpable. This reading should have been a compliment; after all, every writer wants to hear that their character feels real. But it didn’t feel like a compliment.
I worried that the workshop had essentially turned into another game of Two Truths and a Lie. If my character and I had both been young mothers, what else did we share? Did I resent my child, too? Did I despise my husband for impregnating me and leaving me with the bulk of the child-rearing? Did I feel like my life was a waste now that domesticity and motherhood consumed me? My character certainly did, and readers might think my portrayal of her was too good to simply be the product of imagination and talent. I was scared my peers thought she was a bad mother—and I was one, too, for writing her.
Apparently, it’s easier to believe every woman writing is living out the lives of her various protagonists than to believe that women are capable of just as much imagination and talent as men.
This fear was perhaps paranoid, but not at all unfounded. In 2007, Scottish author, journalist and broadcaster Muriel Gray was a judge for the Orange Prize for Fiction, now called the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which is awarded exclusively to women authors and continues to be one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary prizes. Reflecting on this experience for The Guardian, Gray remarks:
[It’s] hard to ignore the sheer volume of thinly disguised autobiographical writing from women on small-scale domestic themes such as motherhood, boyfriend troubles and tiny family dramas. These writers appear to have forgotten the fundamental imperative of fiction writing. It’s called making stuff up.
Gray never explains how she knows that women writing “on small-scale domestic themes” are crafting “thinly disguised autobiography.” She never interrogates why, exactly, she thinks these women aren’t “making stuff up.” She seems to assume that women writing about domesticity, motherhood, and family are essentially memoirists too cowardly to own their experiences. Let me remind you: Gray is a woman author who was tasked with judging one of the most prestigious literary awards for women in the world. If we can’t even rely on her to believe that women can have an imagination, who can we rely on?
It’s an interesting bind. If women choose to write on domestic themes and their prose isn’t “literary” enough, their work is cast as “chick lit,” which is a genre we are supposed to look down upon because it’s explicitly, unapologetically written for women. If women choose to write on domestic themes and their prose is literary enough, though, their work is accused of being thinly-veiled autobiography, and therefore less skillful—as though there is no talent that goes into crafting fiction so convincing that readers are sure the writer had to experience everything in its pages herself.
I’ve taken to calling this “the autobiography assumption.” Ferrante regularly faces the autobiography assumption with her internationally bestselling Neopolitan novels. When Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person” was published online by The New Yorker, it was misread as memoir almost immediately, with many readers referring to it as an “article” on social media—despite the word “fiction” printed in red at the top of the page. Apparently, it’s easier to believe every woman writing is living out the lives of her various protagonists than to believe that women are capable of just as much imagination and talent as men.
In a Vulture article on autofiction, Christian Lorentzen describes the genre as inviting “readers to imagine they might be reading from something like a diary, where the transit from real life to the page has been more or less direct.” In other words, autofiction isn’t concerned with “making stuff up”; it’s concerned with fashioning art out of the author’s real life, blurring the line between what’s real and what’s not.
My first encounter with the genre was Sheila Heti’s 2010 novel How Should a Person Be? I was fascinated by Heti’s decision to name her protagonist after herself and her characters after her real-life friends, and to include transcriptions of dialogue and real emails—I thought it was genius, really. It reminded me of the ways women I knew talked about art and life and sex and men. I became mildly obsessed with the book, insisting that every woman I knew read it. There was something so refreshing about a woman intentionally, unapologetically crafting her real life into fiction—seemingly without caring at all whether it was “literary” or not, or whether anyone judged her by her fictional avatar. I was sure Heti wouldn’t have cared if her classmates collapsed her narrator and herself in a fiction workshop. In fact, she already did it for them.
Does anyone have enough self-awareness to accurately recreate themselves on the page? As an author, where do you draw the line between reality and fiction? What about as a reader?
While Heti’s decision to liberally blend fiction and real life wasn’t necessarily a reaction to the autobiography assumption, her work still plays with and troubles this pervasive tendency in important and surprising ways. By forcing readers to make the connection between the author’s real life and their fiction, Heti actively turns the reading experience into a 200-page game of Two Truths and a Lie. Which thoughts are Sheila Heti the author’s, and which are Sheila Heti the character’s? Is there a difference? After all, Sheila Heti the author is still coming up with Sheila Heti the character’s thoughts, and therefore must be thinking them, at least obliquely. Using that logic, if Heti the character voices a judgment of Margeaux the character, does that mean Heti the author is also judging Margeaux the real person? When you fashion a character out of yourself, as Heti has, does that character really reflect you? Or does it reflect how you think of yourself? Or neither? Does anyone have enough self-awareness to accurately recreate themselves on the page? As an author, where do you draw the line between reality and fiction? What about as a reader?
Almost as interesting as Heti’s book itself are the critical reactions to it. In an interview with The Quietus, Heti responds to the repeated use of the word “narcissistic” in reviews of her book: “In a lot of the criticism where that word is used, I’m not sure if the critics know what they’re talking about: me, the book, the character, this culture, or what.” Indeed, the inability to sift the truth from the fiction in Heti’s book seemed to have an impact on not just how readers saw her work, but how readers saw her. One writer even called Heti a bitch—despite only having a fictional novel to base this judgment on (that writer later apologized).
How Should a Person Be? seems to make readers and critics alike very uncomfortable, because it does everything a novel by a woman isn’t supposed to do: it actually acknowledges itself as a book from life, thus turning the autobiography assumption inside out; it centers women, depicting the rise and fall of the friendship of artists Sheila and Margaux, as well as Sheila’s brutal sexual relationship with her lover Israel; and it uses these relationships as the basis for philosophical musings on art, personality, sex, and life.
While Muriel Gray could very well dismiss HSAPB as “thinly disguised autobiographical writing” about “drama” and “boyfriend troubles,” I highly doubt she would refer to it as either “small-scale” or “domestic.” HSAPB is simply too well-written and original to be dismissed in any of the usual ways books by women usually are. Thus, the continual, intellectually lazy reliance on condemning the book as “narcissistic,” as though Heti’s mining of her own life were any more narcissistic than the largely autobiographical—and canonical—novels of men like Ernest Hemingway or Jack Keroac.
In an interview with Tin House, Heti said she would have preferred if the cover of the novel didn’t include any references to it being “a book from life” or having used “real emails and transcriptions!” Of course, if her novel didn’t have those things—if the characters had made-up names and the real emails and transcriptions Heti used were passed off as entirely fictional—it wouldn’t have had the same voyeuristic appeal. The underlying promise of “reality” gave the entire novel additional weight that most other forms of fiction don’t have: if any scene was real, if any conflict was real, then its inclusion could have real effects on Heti’s real life. As a result, the book had built-in stakes beyond its own pages. Indeed, Heti hints in a Guardian interview, “I’d never write a book in this way again. I understand why people write fiction now. A lot of complications can arise. Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances.”
I started watching the reality TV show Vanderpump Rules earlier this year because Rihanna tweeted about it and because a friend assured me it was addictive and distracting in all the ways I needed at the time. Vanderpump Rules follows the lives, loves, and fistfights of a group of servers and bartenders at the West Hollywood restaurant SUR, short for Sexy Unique Restaurant. SUR is owned and operated by the rich, fabulous Lisa Vanderpump, who acts as a sort of motherly figure to her stunning staff of wannabe models, actors, and musicians. Since the restaurant is full of beautiful, insecure, jealous people, drama is all but inevitable.
With each episode, I found myself wondering how these people could be so cruel to one another, even as I savoured the opportunity to peek in on that cruelty.
There’s cheating, drinking, screaming, dancing, vacations, more drinking, break ups, make ups, restaurant drama, failing and flailing entertainment careers, and even more drinking. Despite it being called reality TV, none of it is like any reality I know. My life is fairly uneventful. I spend most days in my pajamas, scrolling through Twitter and watching true crime documentaries. The staff of SUR, however, seem to be in a constant state of crisis and conflict. With each episode, I found myself wondering how these people could be so cruel to one another, even as I savoured the opportunity to peek in on that cruelty.
I couldn’t understand why I was so drawn the show. My friend suggested it was cathartic to see people unabashedly acting out in ways we knew we shouldn’t. And it was. But I also felt there was something more to it, as though the very spite with which the cast treats one another has its own magnetism.
Everything about Vanderpump Rules is pure spectacle—from the sexy staff to the restaurant to the luxury suites Vanderpump secures for cast vacations. Whenever an episode ended and I saw a preview of the next episode, my decision to continue binging depended on the degree of spectacle advertised. If one of the Toms was throwing a drink on one of their girlfriends, I was in. If everyone looked like they were getting along well enough, I’d take a break. The more these people hurt one another, the more I wanted to watch them hurt one another.
The show relies on that reaction. Like many reality TV shows, Vanderpump Rules uses spectacle and cruelty to attract and maintain its viewers. According to Varun Duggirala, who has produced Indian reality TV shows Get Gorgeous and Kidnap, “All people working on reality TV have a sadistic side to them [. . .] people crying tends to give you a sense of satisfaction.” While on paper this admission sounds disgusting, it makes sense. I would definitely watch another episode of Vanderpump Rules if I saw someone crying. But what effect does this sadistic marketing have on the contestants themselves, knowing that their pain is my pleasure?
SUR bartender and Vanderpump Rules cast member Jax Taylor has said in interviews,
I pride myself on [the fact that] we have a real show and I’m not going to sit there and sugarcoat things [. . .] Just because there are cameras I’m not going to be like, ‘Oh, I’m going to do this and act like this.’
Jax has been arrested for shoplifting, cheated on every one of his girlfriends, had sex with his best friend’s girlfriend, gotten into fights with total strangers, and has been referred to as a “sociopath” numerous times. His cruelty pushes each person on the show to the point where they eventually stop caring about the cameras altogether, offering a more “real” performance of their pain. And his pay reflects that. According to reports, after Vanderpump herself, Jax has the highest salary of all cast members at a whopping $25,000 per episode. He’s also been rewarded with a spin off show with his current fiancé called Vanderpump Rules: Jax and Brittany Take Kentucky. He is reportedly worth $500,000—all for treating his friends and lovers like shit on television.
It’s tempting to buy into the fantasy and believe that the people we see onscreen are the real people, but once the TV crew appears, the cameras turn on, the producers start whispering in people’s ears and the editors begin manipulating footage, how real can anyone be?
Knowing that those who are especially prone to blow ups and conflicts are featured more heavily on the show, and therefore paid a salary that reflects their impact on ratings, one has to question who these people are when the cameras are turned off. Is Jax playing an asshole for professional gain, or is the show emboldening him to indulge in his worst tendencies? Or do the two feed one another until you can’t tell where the truth ends and the lie begins?
As I watched Vanderpump Rules, I found myself thinking about Heti’s book again, which she crafted with another reality TV show, The Hills, in mind. Just as the characters in How Should a Person Be? are based on real people, the casts of The Hills and Vanderpump Rules are also based on real people. It’s tempting to buy into the fantasy and believe that the people we see onscreen are the real people, but once the TV crew appears, the cameras turn on, the producers start whispering in people’s ears and the editors begin manipulating footage, how real can anyone be?
At the same time, if your partner reveals to you that they’re cheating on you while you’re filming a reality show together, how can you possibly keep that pain hidden from the cameras? How can you reign in your emotions and keep control of your image? We can only suppress pain and anger for so long; once that threshold is crossed, what others think of you doesn’t matter. Cameras don’t matter. All that matters is expressing your rage and agony.
If we were to break down a show like Vanderpump Rules into a game like Two Truths and a Lie, would the cast be able to distinguish truths from lies?
As a society, we’re so used to heavily edited and manufactured reality that our ability to discern between truth and fiction is suffering. A Pew Research Center study found that only 17% of those over 65 could tell the difference between fact and opinion. It’s not just the older generations, either: a 2016 Stanford study of middle school, high school and university students found that, “When it comes to evaluating information that flows through social media channels, they are easily duped.”
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these developments have come nearly 20 years after Survivor ushered in what the Washington Post has called “the era of reality TV.” For almost two decades, reality TV has presented heavily manipulated narratives—all while telling us that what we’re watching is “real.” Survivor allegedly uses body doubles to stand in for contestants during physical challenges. Storage Wars producers purchase storage units in advance, then plant valuable items inside for the cast to win. Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag from The Hills revealed that they had to shoot a scene where Montag thought she was pregnant 15 times before producers were satisfied with Pratt’s faux anger. The mansion the Kardashians pass off as their home on Keeping Up with the Kardashians is actually an empty house turned into a set.
It’s not hard to see a correlation between the falseness of reality TV and the recent rise of fake news. We’ve all witnessed the era of reality TV, watched as the line between reality and fiction has blurred before our eyes, leaving us amused, but ultimately unconcerned. Considering how easy it has been for people and foreign governments to manipulate social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and 4Chan to influence Western politics and spread false conspiracy theories, perhaps we shouldn’t have been.
In any other era, Trump’s evident dishonesty, coupled with the absurd number of scandals he has been involved with, would have had him impeached by now. But we are in the era of reality TV. The rules are different now ...
In the lead up to the 2016 Republican primaries, media-planning and analytics firm AMG did an online poll of Republican voters after their candidates debated on CNN. In addition to asking who they thought won the debate, AMG also asked whether the person being polled watched The Apprentice or The Celebrity Apprentice, the reality TV shows that subsequently-elected US President Donald Trump had hosted for 11 years. His favourable rating among viewers of The Apprentice was a staggering 62%, whereas those who didn’t watch the show rated him at only 37%. It didn’t matter that he had no political experience, or that he has filed for bankruptcy six times, or that he has never released his tax returns. They saw Trump “playing an uber businessman and master manager for an hour a week on reality TV,” as CNN political commentator David Axelrod put it, and that’s precisely who Trump was to them.
Of course, that’s not to say that Trump’s business experience hasn’t been valuable in his rise to the presidency. In an interview with PBS, journalist Gwenda Blair, who authored The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President, explains:
Salesmen are performers. They target their market. What does the market want to hear? [. . . Trump] would tell the market, in his first project, which was the Grand Hyatt, a hotel, [that] it was the biggest ballroom in New York. It wasn’t but people liked the idea.
This “exaggerated hyperbole,” which Blair claims is Trump’s brand, would be classified by most people as lies. Since his inauguration, he has lied so often on Twitter and in the news that The Washington Post has started to keep track; as of the writing of this essay, Trump has made 6,420 “false or misleading claims” in 649 days, or approximately nine lies per day. In any other era, Trump’s evident dishonesty, coupled with the absurd number of scandals he has been involved with, would have had him impeached by now. But we are in the era of reality TV. The rules are different now, and Trump has not only been aware of that, he’s been depending on it.
The spectacle of reality TV—the same cruelty and drama and backstabbing that I love so much about Vanderpump Rules—has fundamentally shifted the way that we interpret and respond to the world around us. We’ve become accustomed to escalating public drama and escalating cruelty in ways we never have been before. We expect it, even crave it. And, if recent history has shown us anything, eventually, we come to accept it, even when we shouldn’t. In true reality TV fashion, Trump has utilized his cruelty to get what he has always wanted most: attention. Whenever he has made offensive statements on Twitter or on TV, he hasn’t been deplatformed or challenged. He hasn’t been ignored. He’s been rewarded with even more media attention. Just like Jax from Vanderpump Rules, the worse Trump has treated people, the more he has gained. The problem, of course, is that Trump hasn’t just gained a spinoff show or a higher salary for next season; he has gained the most powerful position in the world.
I see how the era of reality TV had given rise to the era of post-truth politics and provocative hate mongers, creating a marketplace out of attention and outrage.
We’re living in a time where truth is less valuable than attention. Mainstream media outlets offering outrageous, offensive, click-bait editorials to outrageous, offensive, click-baity human beings; allowing pundits to argue marginalized peoples’ humanity; offering a false equivalence between opinions that have no basis in truth and those that do; continuously hiding behind the rationale that we must hear “all sides” of an issue—it’s the new normal, world-wide. And because of capitalism, it won’t change. Advertisers are looking to pay for ad space on the websites, newspapers, and broadcast stations with the largest audience, not the most moral integrity. FOX News is currently considered the “King of Cable,” celebrating 67 consecutive quarters as the highest-rated cable network in the US as of October 2018. It was also deemed the least accurate news source on cable by Politifact in 2015, and has paid out thousands of dollars in lawsuits for falsely reporting Conservative conspiracy theories as facts. Truth doesn’t garner attention the same way lies do, and as such news stations today must choose between reporting responsibly and staying in business.
Knowing this, can we be surprised when they invite white supremacists to give speeches at The New York Times Festival, or the Munk Debates, or on CNN and CBC? Can we be surprised that white nationalist and Toronto mayoral candidate Faith Goldy came in third in one of the most diverse cities in the world? After all, when people like this thrive on attention, even Tweets from opponents pointing out their racism, sexism, transphobia, or xenophobia will inevitably feed them. Like any savvy reality TV star, the Gavin McInneses and Faith Goldys of the world know that the worse they treat people, the more drama they create, the higher their profiles and the bigger their salaries. All we ever give them is our eyes and ears—but unfortunately, that’s enough.
I’ve spent most of 2018 reading essays and creative nonfiction by marginalized people who see the way the tide has been turning against us. I can see it so clearly. Every time negative news has come out about Trump, right-wing pundits have crafted it into a Liberal conspiracy instead of engaging with it as an inconvenient, unavoidable truth. Every time a media personality says something that demonizes and dehumanizes an entire group of people, critics and supporters alike watch as the implications of that hatred are dismissed using the same “free speech” defense white nationalists have weaponized so well. I see how the era of reality TV had given rise to the era of post-truth politics and provocative hate mongers, creating a marketplace out of attention and outrage.
I’d always thought the secret to winning Two Truths and a Lie was in keeping your lies small. But really, it has nothing to do with the magnitude of the lies you tell—it’s about what you can convince other people to believe.
Here are three statements that can be divided into two truths and a lie:
1. News organizations monetize hatred and outrage for ratings and ad revenue. 2. There are groups of people who deserve pain, suffering, even death, simply for existing. 3. For marginalized people, free speech has rarely, if ever, existed.
Which statements will you allow yourself to believe?
