A photo of Sarah Viren

Sarah Viren’s To Name the Bigger Lie


Congratulations to Sarah Viren for her upcoming memoir To Name the Bigger Lie, published by Scribner. It begins as Sarah researches her high school English teachera man who taught his students to question everythingin preparation for a new book. As she delves into the effects of his teaching, however, her wife Marta is informed that she’s being investigated for sexual misconduct. Sarah knows the accusations must be false, but when she’s drawn further into the investigation, Sarah struggles with the nature of truth, skepticism, and what is fact.

A thrilling, labyrinthine and ultimately illuminating reckoning with what it feels like to caught up in a vortex of post-truth, conspiracy, and lies, Sarah Viren’s To Name the Bigger Lie is a fascinating and deeply disturbing account of our contemporary age of weaponized falsehoods. That what most of us experience only through the news came for her life so personally makes for heart-in-throat reading. This is a memoir, yes, but it’s also a view into a terrifying aspect of modernity, and Viren’s ability to unspool complicated tangles for the reader is unparalleled.

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body

Sarah Viren has written an essay collection, Mine, which won the the River Teeth Book Prize and the GLCA New Writer’s Award. Currently, she is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Arizona State University and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. To learn more about her, visit her website.

Sarah Viren’s To Name the Bigger Lie is a work of radical moral philosophy as much as a memoir of one woman’s confrontation with the seeming contradictions of certainty and doubt, truth and conspiracy, of the sometimes unbridgeable distance between the truth we know and the one we can prove. This is one of the most astonishing books I’ve ever read—a beacon in these uncertain times.

Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings

To Name the Bigger Lie will be available in June of 2023. Pre-order it here.