The Truth about Me

The Truth About Meis the fiction debut of extraordinary stories by New York writer Louise Marburg, in which shortcomings, secrets, and inventions turn notions of love and self upside down. No matter what their station in life, the characters in these wry and moving stories face moments in which the shock of being and becoming comes from within. tied by a thread of personal revelation, the characters in each are either hiding, revealing, or discovering an essential truth about themselves. In the title story, a mentally ill yet well off man buys a house in a working class neighborhood and attempts to hide his affliction from the people who befriend him. In " Stick Shift," a sheltered debutante meets an older man at a bar and cedes to her adventuresome side. " The Other Rachel Hersch," is the story of an assistant to a literary agent who pretends to be someone other than herself in order to deny her obsessive-compulsive past. A grandmother risks her own life to save others from a brutal killer in " Anything Can Happen," and an ill woman in " The Three Stages of Fat" must wrestle with her overwhelming vanity. Both dark and funny, The Truth About Me explores the complexities of self-knowledge in ordinary lives.