Here’s a notion we memoirists lean into and hard: there is no larger, objective truth. Call it absolute truth, forever absent. Call it the inconvenient truth. Call it the reality we all share—and can’t agree on. There are only our personal truths, which we hold to be self-evident.
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If possession is believed to be nine-tenths of the law, then perception is ten-tenths of the world. Perspective is everything, according to this thinking. I am living my truth, you are living yours, and never the twain shall meet. This pop psychology has only gained in popularity, and it was abetted by one of the most popular, and powerful, Americans alive.
On receiving the Cecile B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in 2018, Oprah Winfrey told us:
it’s the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice, to tyrants and victims, and secrets and lies. I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times, which brings me to this. What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.
The absolute truth, in a rhetorical flourish, becomes, there at the end, your truth, and your truth, not the absolute truth—whatever that is—is what went on to caption a million memes.
The memes might be new, but the notion is not.
Friedrich Nietzsche believed that truth was impossible. There can only be perspective and interpretation, he argued, and these are driven by a person’s interests, or what Nietzsche called, in German, “will to power”—here, our English translation is already at a degree of remove from Nietzsche’s truth, der Wille zur Macht.
We’ve made truth synonymous with story and, by doing so, we’ve fractured the unifying power of the truth.
In translation, the phrase “will to power” is less true to Nietzsche’s intent than, say, self-determination. “Truths are illusions,” he wrote, “of which we have forgotten that they are illusions.” There are no facts, only interpretations that we each determine on our own.
This willful democratization of truth is empowering for nonfiction writers, and memoirists especially. If we all have our individual truths, we can write what we want with the confidence that it is true, at least to us. This is Oprah’s “most powerful tool” shaping Nietzsche’s “will to power” to better express our individuality.
Having recently published a true-crime memoir called Best Copy Available, I depended upon my truth—especially in the early drafting—the need for assurance in my own version of events. The mindset—this democracy of the truth, where my vote mattered, and most—relieves a tremendous burden—the burden of proof—and lightens the load of research and corroboration. It makes the writing easier, if not necessarily better.
But once I began revising and rewriting, fact-checking my own work along the way, I soon found that my truth deviated gravely from the truths of others, and often from the documented truth I uncovered in research. True crime taught me the true nature of the truth, capital T. And it showed me Oprah is wrong. The most powerful tool we have is not your truth or my truth. The most powerful tool is the absolute truth; it is the measure for our smaller, lesser truths, which often prove untrue.
Because the memoir aspect of my book, the true part, demanded I tell my truth, but the crime portions were, I found, anathema to my truth. There was a larger truth at work, one I was striving for and seeking to confirm—a shared truth, a truth greater than me and outside my perspective or my possession, outside my understanding, even—that was founded on hard facts.
My stab at true crime was something of a feint. I soon realized I was more interested in interrogating the truth—and how to tell it—than I was in an investigation of the crimes. And so my memoir is as much about the essential, but impossible, nature of truth as it is about crime. Or, in my case, crimes, a trio of them: my mother’s violent rape, my grandfather’s attempted murder, and my repeated childhood molestation.
Delving into these personal trials was humbling, and humiliating. As often as not, my truth, and the truths of my loved ones, were far from the facts. So far, in many cases, that they should not be consider truths at all. They are versions. They are accounts. They are stories. That’s why, whenever I encountered this gap—opened up by, say, a 90-page criminal investigation report about my mother’s rape, or the 40-year-old newspaper articles detailing my grandfather’s knifing at the hands of my uncle—I sided with the facts.
As I revised, each draft hewed nearer to that unattainable absolute truth Oprah first mentions, the larger truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice, to tyrants and victims, and secrets and lies. It is our smaller truths, yours and mine, so very self-interested and self-determining, that lead us to corruption, tyranny, and lies. A refusal of objective truth creates space—culturally—for the worst interpretation of Nietzsche’s will to power, where self-determination is all that matters, and decides who gets power.
Though our truths, our stories, may feel true to us, they are often far from actuality. We’ve made truth synonymous with story and, by doing so, we’ve fractured the unifying power of the truth. The practical litmus test I returned to as I rewrote—my marker for absolute truth—was eyewitness accounts, and how we’ve revised our understanding of the ways they function, and fail.
Because if Nietzsche’s right, if his philosophies are true, and everyone has their own truth, and our truths are self-evident—and thereby created equal—then eyewitness testimony should still be considered the best kind of evidence, a supremacy it held for most of modern history, right up to the late 1980s.
Then came the advent of DNA analysis.
This scientific breakthrough, and its slow disruption of the justice system, revealed that however we define the capital-T truth, our points-of-view and the ways we express them, even under oath, cannot be counted on to know the whole truth, and nothing but, with much reliability at all.
The justice system has moved partly away from this factual relativism, by shifting focus, from firsthand accounts to forensics. Science now supersedes the stories that witnesses tell, but there is a fair amount of evidence to show that some scientific “facts,” like blood splatter analysis, can be every bit as faulty.
True crime at its best, as a genre, works to expose some of these “truths” that we take for granted, calling into question their veracity, and occasionally putting on display that, in fact, these assumed “truths” were fictions all along.
The absolute truth is unattainable, whatever it may be, always beyond our grasp, but that does not mean it doesn’t exist.
The media industry—in our books and movies, our memoirs and biopics—is partly to blame for our preferences. Personal truths are moving; absolute truth is abstract. Our media thrive on hyperbole, on firsthand accounts, on our individual, tailor-made truths, and our politicians only perpetuate them, going on to publish their own memoirs, and to feature in biopics, based on true stories. Maybe no politician has benefitted more from the personalization of the truth than Donald J. Trump.
With his second inauguration, President Trump, our first ever felon to sit in the Oval Office—though surely not the first sexual offender—gets to reemploy his brand of post-truth politics, defined as “truthful hyperbole” in The Art of the Deal, where all criticism, no matter how factual, is fake news, and, according to the Supreme Court, any of his crimes, however true, are immune from prosecution as long as they are official acts.
Truthful hyperbole may work for Trump, but true-crime writers know such an approach is not—and can’t be—true. There are no alternative facts. But the same facts can and will be used to tell competing stories. That doesn’t change the facts, nor the truth.
Having gotten down my truth on the page, and seen it into print, having been forced to reconcile my meager truth with the awesome and higher power of a greater truth, where lawsuits and libel are a very real threat, I’ve come to the conclusion that we do a disservice to the truth—and to Truth—by trying to tailor it to everyone. A democracy of truth has proven false. The truth does not belong to us all. We might all get a say on the truth, thanks to the right to free speech, but none of us have ownership over it. Not even Trump, despite his efforts to trademark and monopolize the truth, branding it Truth Social.
The truth is anti-social. The truth belongs to no one. The absolute truth is unattainable, whatever it may be, always beyond our grasp, but that does not mean it doesn’t exist.
The truth exists apart from us, outside of our identities or individual experiences, beyond our will to power or our irritable reaching after fact and reason. And fuck Nietzsche. Because what happens happens, however we perceive it. And if President Trump presides at one end of the truth, where his truth, told often enough, becomes the truth, at the other end stands President John F. Kennedy.
In a letter of June 1961, fewer than five months after his inauguration, President Kennedy wrote: “Truth is a tyrant—the only tyrant to whom we can give allegiance.” This truism bears repeating. Truth is a tyrant. And a just one.
JFK understood that if we all have our own truths, then there is no truth. Ironically, and maybe to prove his point, JFK’s assassination is about as far from an agreed-upon truth as any true crime in American history. But the truth of how he was gunned down in Dallas happened in only one way, even if this is a truth that we, the American people, can never fully know. And Kennedy’s murder puts on display how democracy dies. Not in darkness but in dishonesty. In a willful refusal to call our own truths into question, in a failure to have faith in a greater truth, an absolute truth that belongs to none of us but is a truth we nonetheless all share.
