Review: A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies

In A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, Peter Ho Davies writes about a liberal boomer writer/professor whose wife has an abortion and spends years reckoning with the cognitive dissonance of the action. The fact that I’m debating whether or not to refer to their fetus as their “aborted child” due to my personal pro-choice leanings speaks to the complicated nature of reproduction, maternal health, politics, and childrearing, and I have to keep asking myself who am I trying to be considerate of when modifying my language.

In the most accurate terms, the unnamed narrator and his wife make the choice to abort a fetus when they learn that the cells underwent an early stage mutation and that the child they give birth to is not likely to survive. The fetus was not “nonviable,” but instead had mosaicism of an ambiguous nature—unlikely to survive, with the smallest sliver of possibility. Though they decide that an abortion would be necessary, the father spends the next years of his life somewhat haunted by that ambiguity, his “complicity in killing” the fetus, grief over losing the child, and an outside world that sends him mixed messages about the “sanctity of life.”

While highly readable and relevant, elegant and minimal, the narrator’s meditations really fell flat for me. Even though this novel depicts abortion as a decision with more consequence than theoretical discussion, the narrator’s intellectualization of the issue was frustrating. Maybe it’s because I’m just a desensitized twenty-something with a creative writing degree sustained by high-octane screeds and schmaltz, but the father’s emotions felt so distant despite utilizing the immediacy of a third person close narrative and having access to his interiority. If Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine felt dispassionately surreal, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself read as alienated yet mundane, as though a reader could literally see what was happening, but the emotions struggled to pass through a plate glass wall.

This narrator seems to go through with the motions of emotional revelation without actually coming across as vulnerable. The dark truths he realizes about fatherhood read more as intrusive thoughts than intimate realizations. Even the choice to be called the “father,” and his wife the “mother” and so on, feels somewhat alienating because the characters are painted in metonymical brushstrokes; they don’t really come across as individual people, but props for ideology. The father actually seems a bit disinterested in his wife’s opinions, and despite knowing that she’s an editor and a mother who complains sometimes, the reader knows very little about her. The son he does have is “twice exceptional,” meaning gifted and neurodivergent, which feels like a bit of a cop-out just to extend the Schrodinger’s Cat metaphor of abortion.

This book is worth reading, especially since it’s short and a comparatively “apolitical” meditation on a “hot button issue,” meaning I could very well recommend it to anyone regardless of their current beliefs regarding abortion. But nothing about this book really reached my soul; its most graceful and cutting truths work better in pull quotes than in context.

Thank you HMH via NetGalley for the advance copy!