From an award-winning author, this novel about the choice to start a family is an "achingly honest, searingly comic portrait of fatherhood."*
A People ten Best Books of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • An Independent (UK) twenty Best Books of the Year
"Wise, bracingly honest . . . A reassuring reality check . . . Exhilarating." — New York Times Book Review
A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself traces the complex consequences of one of the most personal yet public, intimate yet political experiences a family can have: to have a child, and conversely, the decision 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 novel is an unprecedented depiction of fatherhood.
"There are some stories that require as much courage to write as they do art. . . . The world needs more stories like this one, more of this kind of courage, more of this kind of love." —*National Book Award–winning author Sigrid Nunez