Book Of Untruths

by Miranda Doyle

A Book of Untruths is a family story told through lies. This is a book about love, marriage, childhood, ageing, and the terrible acts we commit, remember and forget. It is about how we build a sense of ourselves through the stories we tell and the memories we shape. Shocking, invigorating and revelatory, A Book of Untruths shows that with every breath we take, another untruth may come out.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography Memoir, Cultural, Biography, Family

272 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2017

Reviews

[Λίνα Θωμάρεη · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't review a book that is based on true events. How can review a family story? With what words can I describe the thoughts and the memories of this woman?

3,5 stars because I have to.

[Zeba Talkhani · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel like I was waiting all my life for this book. I'm really interested in lies, unreliable memories and how the unsaid shapes us. I would highly recommend this book.

[Sylvia Vetta]

Relevant ‘Start the Week’ on BBC Radio4. In a time of invented facts fiction can tell the truth. I understand completely where Miranda Doyle is coming from ‘fictionalising’ her memoir. I have been on a similar journey. I spent 3 years interviewing Qu Leilei- one of a group of courageous Chinese artists called The Stars . I asked Wang Keping what he felt before he left his flat to march to Tiananmen Square (October 1979 ). He said he burned his diaries and any letters that could link him to someone because he thought he wouldn’t be coming back and he wanted to protect his friends. I wanted to write their story! In the end I wrote Brushstrokes in Time a memoir of a FICTIONAL female artist called Little Winter. I believe my novel expressed the emotional truth better than a non-fiction account of the Stars. The Reith Lectures will be given by Hilary Mantel and she knows what it takes to get to the truth through fiction.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhere between 3.5 and 4

I love a good memoir, and this one was pretty great. This was really well written, a quick read and an interesting examination of the lies we tell ourselves about our past. Recommended!

[Niklas Pivic · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am lying Since this is a book about lying let’s start off with some facts. We all do it. Politicians, of course, are amongst the worst. There’s Watergate, the Clinton blowjob, Blair’s confused attitude to the evidence on the eve of the war in Iraq. Widespread institutional deception plagues the front pages. Individually and collectively we’ve been brought to our knees by the deceit of bankers. There’s the shameful behaviour of the Catholic Church as it tried to protect its reputation, and the scramble by the police to save themselves after the Hillsborough Stadium disaster of 1989. Police themselves are lied to every day. In one study by the Innocence Project, more than 25 per cent of wrongfully convicted people had made a false confession. People lie to keep themselves out of prison, but they also lie to end interrogations orientated around the presumption of dishonesty. Lies beget lies.

Every part of this book is divided into different lies, all surrounding Doyle's family, including herself. She does not venture to say lies are inherently bad, but at times necessary, as with small children.

There's quite some interesting science about how lies work in all of this:

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame asked 110 people to take a lie-detector test every week for ten weeks, reporting how many lies they had told. By the end of the study, all the subjects lied less, and all reported improvements in their relationships and sleep patterns; they had fewer headaches and fewer sore throats. Liars talk too much, as you may have noticed. They bury their lies in narrative.

Also, on remembering and forgetting:

There are two reasons why we forget. The first is that our brains lack storage. Like Cambridge University Library, which is required to house every word published in the UK and Ireland since 1662, there is just never going to be enough space. Approximately a thousand titles arrive at the library every Thursday in red plastic crates. Piles of books litter most surfaces, snaking spine-up along the floor. There are overflow areas, off-site storage, and platoons of ‘fetchers’ in the basement hunting down, sometimes on handwritten paper slips, requests from upstairs. The second hypothesis is poor retrieval, and here we have to imagine the library after a decade of austerity, its workforce shrunk by half. Faced with a mountain of unopened red crates, the library, like our brains, is engulfed by misshelved, poorly referenced material. There is no time for cataloguing and filing. It is an institution gone rogue, operating without any regard for management, or for the truth.

[...]

Nietzsche famously pointed out that the existence of forgetting has never been proven. What he means is the strong, irrecoverable forgetting that vanishes the word ‘papier-mâché’ for ever. Rather like trying to prove there is no monster in Loch Ness, absence is always going to be difficult to demonstrate.

But mostly, the author's relationship with her parents is very interesting. The book actually starts out with a photograph of a note from the author's mother, saying something like "You can write anything you want."

As Doyle is an adult, she carries out adult conversations with her very queasy mother:

‘I was ill during your brother’s pregnancy,’ she said. ‘Something serious?’ ‘We were told Ed would lose his sight.’ There was a long pause while she weighed the balance of things. ‘It was something your father gave me.’ ‘Something he gave you?’ There was another pause. ‘What did he give you?’ ‘Grounds for divorce.’ It did not take me as long to process this answer as it should have. ‘An STD?’ She didn’t reply, the baby huffing hot breaths against my neck. ‘A sexually transmitted disease?’ I squeaked. ‘An STD?’ This was a woman who waved her hands above her head in church each Sunday morning. ‘Which one?’

The author plainly adds that she is lying in the book, which, in a Werner Herzog-ish way is quite honest, but on the whole, that doesn't subtract from the book at all.

The author also delves into deceit:

Charles Eisenstein, a radical economist, argues that corporate deceit, through advertising and branding, is destroying language. We are so used to the culture of ubiquitous lying, where America’s navy is branded ‘A Global Force for Good’ and ‘Freedom’ is no longer something to strive for but a brand of shoe, that we no longer hear what it is that Donald Trump is saying. The tragedy is that even though journalists itemised every single lie during the campaign (which, by election week, according to Politifact, was a whopping 70 per cent of all statements made) we heard he was deceiving us, but no longer cared.

Despite all of that science, the more interesting bits are about the author's cantankerous relationship with her parents, and how they didn't work together.

The terror was not the beatings. I could handle those. The terror was that I never could relax. I smashed the shed window once with my football. I went in to confess and take the punishment (get it over with). He just laughed. I covered a book slightly incorrectly (simple childhood error) and was beaten so hard with a wooden spoon (the nearest weapon to hand) that it broke. My intellect is what saved me. The only time Mum and Dad smiled at me at the same time was when I got straight As at O-grade. So when Dad tried to beat knowledge into you or Sean I would be sitting on the stairs trying to send you the answers telepathically.

One of her brothers writes to her:

Now I have too much good in my life to think about the past. Why dwell on all that? What’s the point? They were shit parents. It happens. I survived and have done my best to fix myself. Anyway life is not about the past. It’s not really about the future either. It’s what we do today.

It's well written, even though it's a science-cum-personal change book. I like the bits about her early love life, as well as the chapters about her growing up. Overall, an interesting book, with rigid, interesting style, which at times becomes its own enemy.

[Louise Burgess Cox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Each short chapter is a lie from childhood that Miranda unravels in her memoirs. As the writer examines her upbringing, it is difficult to warm to her parents. She describes a philandering father who frequently beats his four children. Her mother is religious and not respected. The father tries to escape the family by taking up employment in Saudi and not including his wife or children on his visa application. Eventually Miranda's mother, Maureen, follows with the children but the offspring are later dispatched to boarding school. Tales of boarding school rituals were disturbing and are hopefully now confined to a different age. As an academic, I appreciated the attempts to justify behaviours from psychology literature, but I am not convinced that other readers would appreciate this approach. I was unclear as to what the photographs added. Overall it's a brave debut novel that was well written and a quick read.

[Chris]

A fantastic addition to the genre of memoir. Doyle pieces together events from what happened, what she thinks happened, what others told her happened, what she never knew happened, and what she discovered only later happened. Throughout she examines the existing psychological and medical knowledge available about truth, lies, and memory.
I perchance began reading “Untruths” as I was reading “The Body Keeps The Score”, creating another case study and further reflection on the mental and physical fragility and resilience of humanity.

[Louise Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a family story told through a series of lies. Written in small chapters it features one of these lies and builds to form a picture of Miranda Doyle's life. A book about love, family and marriage.

I liked this original memoir. It's well written and thought out. I got caught up in this book very quickly and finished it in a few hours. Loved it.

I would like to thank NetGalley, Faber and Faber and the author Miranda Doyle for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Ameet Shah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is like few books you have read elsewhere and for that reason alone, it is worth reading. Remorselessly honest, deeply dark, it speaks to experiences that we would rather not confront. But not everyone is born into a constructive and loving family. Some families have issues, baggage, resentments and the consequences of mistakes, usually well-intentioned but nonetheless mistakes. And what happens if you grow up in such a family. Read this book and find out.

[Zoe Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in a day and really enjoyed it. Brave, direct and honest writing about her family, each chapter is a family lie . She is funny and tough which is a great mix.
There is also interesting writing about truth and different perception and memory within a family.
A clever book, but very readable.

[Patience · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, painfully honest, and at times difficult to read. A tremendous, thought-provoking memoir that recognises the challenge for human beings - for all of us - of separating 'truth' from 'falsehood' in the stories we tell ourselves and each other.

[V Woods · Rating 5 out of 5]

A personal, often shocking, always thought-provoking and definitely gripping read.

[Sophie Cayeux · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got drawn into her family’s life and enjoyed thoroughly my visit.

[ANFendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Made me think bout my past and childhood, what was the kind of lies or untruth that we tell to each other to bury the hurtful pasts. What was real and was not? Really great book to indulge

[u.a.z.a]

*No rating*

This was definitely an interesting read.

[Annette Kane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting premise

[Cassidy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir told through lies, an effective use of one device to explain how we weave and construct our lives.

[Jane Menczer · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary book. Deeply moving, harrowing, yet shot through with brilliantly quirky and self-deprecating humour, this is one of the most engaging and thought-provoking memoirs that I’ve read. A life story told through a series of interlinked snapshots, 'A Book of Untruths' is a beautifully crafted piece of non-fiction, written with exquisite clarity. The great irony is that Miranda Doyle’s memoir is characterised by hair-raising honesty and a painful, courageous frankness, which is highly compelling and leaves the reader buzzing with questions about the nature of memory and the fundamental role that storytelling, of one sort or another, plays in the life of every family. An essential read.

[Ally Yang · Rating 3 out of 5]

[2021 no.96]

原本以為是充斥著謊言的故事，結果是作者本身及其家族，關於謊言記憶複雜情感關係的回憶錄，然後我不知道為什麼要讀這種喃喃自語式的，充塞一些研究資料輔佐，僅關於他們自己家裡的私事。我真的很想跟作者說，你媽已經對你很好了，不要那麼愛抱怨。

----------------

女人說謊多半是為了讓交談對象感覺舒服，男人說謊則是為了讓自己看來較為得體。（p.16）

如果我們的大腦具有可塑性，那我們的記憶也具有可塑性。（p.35）

我害怕對愛這種事撒謊，因為這會永遠毀了愛。（p.85）

【taaze 35-23】

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brave, brutal, harsh. Heart wrenching - and funny.

Yes, I really suggest champagne

Ed!

[Louise Holland]

Definitely recommend