I’m judging the L.A. Times 2020 and 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got me to read on even though it was among 296 other books I’m charged to read.


“An older colleague told him once cats were baby substitutes. ‘They weigh the same, they sleep on you, they roll around on their backs kicking their legs in the air. They mewl.’”
I’m a fan of the autofictive tradition and glad Davies took on this topic in this way.

Peter Ho Davies's A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself is an incisive account of fatherhood and deals with difficult issues such as abortion, parenting and guilt over care for an ageing parent. Sparse yet supremely effective, Davies's prose has a very memoir-like quality to it and offers rare insights into raising a child: "It's like doing time, they complain. House arrest. Living under curfew in a dictatorship!" There are equally cutting insights about abortion when the protagonist encounters pro-life activists in front of an abortion clinic. This meditation on fatherhood and sundry is a must-read.

Thank you to Houghton Mifflin and NetGalley for the ARC of this ebook to read and review.

Somehow this review didn’t get written in a timely manner. Peter Ho Davies is becoming one of my favorite writers. This book is so very close to a 5 star book. I read it in one day, which says a lot since I am not a fast reader. Brutal at points and not for everyone, but it really seemed to capture so much about parenthood.. it’s almost as if every word is contemplated and if needed, it’s kept. There are no superfluous passages in this book and it still remains powerful. The fact that I read it6 months ago and still think about it says a lot.

I thought this book was just fine. Nothing really special stood out to me. I enjoyed that it was a quick read. I'm not sure if I would pick up this author again. The writing was decent and to the point, however I would have like some more detail.

3.5 A decision a couple makes, a decision that at the time they felt was right, that there was little choice. A personal decision that continues to haunt, the father, the mother, the marriage and even their view of the child they eventually have. This child, a son, different, having his own difficulties. A pervading sense of shame, failure, did they do the right thing, are they doing the right thing now? Thoughts, doubts, second guessing, atonement.

The father, mother, son are never named. The book is told mainly from the father's point of view. An intimate look at fatherhood, sex, marriage parenting and decisions made. This is a unique read and an important subject but also presented me with a conundrum. It is told realistically I believe, though of course I'm not a man so may not be the best judge. But are men likely to read this book? And while the subject is an important one I always felt as if I was being held at a distance. To be honest, reading over 200 pages of someone t hihoughts, regrets, which were often repeated, can get tedious. So ultimately my feelings, thoughts on this book are mixed.

ARC from Netgalley

This is a beautiful book in the way that it explores parental love, guilt, and relationships. Davies has such a light, humorous touch that the weighty issues that this book tackles don’t feel overwhelming, but the book also takes those issues very seriously. It’s honest and absorbing, and I thought it was an excellent read. There’s a section in the middle about the abortion debate that feels a little more staged, but it doesn’t detract from the rest of the book. As a parent, this rang very true for me.

Searing, funny,tragic, brilliant in its own intimate and revelatory way, even if it’s all fiction. This novel has already received much positive attention and now I see why. A dazzling statement.

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on January 5, 2021

The protagonist of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself is haunted by guilt. He put his father in a home after dementia rendered him incapable of living independently. His wife had a “virtuous” abortion, a choice they made to avoid giving birth to a child who would have suffered from a rare and severe genetic defect. When he finally becomes a parent, his son is on the spectrum and he regrets the occasions on which he loses patience with him and behaves in an unloving way. Guilt about his parenting, guilt about the choice not to be a parent, guilt about his relationship with his parent, are emotions that cause him to question his decency, although only a decent person would feel such guilt.

To manage his guilt, the protagonist volunteers to escort women from their cars to an abortion clinic, shielding them from protestors who are motivated by the cruelty of their religious beliefs to shout “baby killer.” To forestall his guilt, the protagonist tries not to become upset with his wife and strives to make his son happy. His own happiness is always elusive, perhaps sacrificed to marriage and parenthood.

The story is told in the third person from the father’s perspective. The narrative is internal, a record of thoughts that allows us to see the mother and the son and the abortion clinic director only as the father sees them. The novel’s value lies in its deep penetration of the father’s mind. As the father anticipates all the inevitable ways in which his growing son will change, he wonders whether his own capacity for change has been stunted — by age or fear or inertia. He thinks about shame — how the world needs both more and less shame — and how shame makes us human. He concludes that doubts and regrets make pride possible, the flip side of shame. Whenever his son overcomes an obstacle or conquers a fear, the father is proud both of the son’s accomplishment and of the role he played in helping his son achieve. Still, he lives in fear of all the things he can’t control.

The father ponders the notion that children are about posterity, an “essential hedge against mortality.” He yearns for his son’s admiration and cowers from his judgment. He worries that he is not a good son to his own father and wonders what he is teaching his son about parental relationships.

Peter Ho Davies is at his best when the father contemplates the ethical issues surrounding abortion and the potential harm to living people caused by champions of the unborn. He is sensitive to the differing feelings — loss or relief — that might follow an abortion. He acknowledges the sincerity of abortion protestors while recognizing that those who choose abortion do not deserve to have feelings of shame or guilt amplified by strangers who have never needed to make the same choice (or hypocrites who have had abortions and then advocate taking that right away from others).

The novel has no plot beyond its narration of a few condensed years of the protagonist’s life and thoughts. It has few characters. Peter Ho Davies’ apparent goal is to offer an account of the fears a man might experience when confronting difficulties that he perceives as monumental — the choice to abort a fetus when he and his wife were hoping to become parents; the struggle to address a parent’s dementia; the struggle to raise an autistic child.

While Davies achieves that goal, his portrayal of most characters is abbreviated. Even the protagonist, who teaches literature and writing, is seen only in terms of his preoccupation with worries and fears. If his emotional range extends beyond anxiety, Davies felt no need to share. Perhaps the novel is intended as a study of anxiety, making other states of mind irrelevant to the story.

The honesty with which the man’s worries and fears are exposed is the novel’s saving grace. I expect that contemplative readers who have experienced fatherhood or agonized about an abortion will identify with the protagonist. Readers who prefer plot-driven fiction might have less interest in the story, although trying to place yourself in the mind of someone who has lived a life that differs from yours is one of the great rewards of reading.

RECOMMENDED

My starred review for Booklist is here: https://www.booklistonline.com/A-Lie-Someone-Told-You-about-Yourself-/pid=9739727

The review was also cross-posted to Smithsonian BookDragon: http://smithsonianapa.org/bookdragon/a-lie-someone-told-you-about-yourself-by-peter-ho-davies-in-booklist/

Peter Ho Davies set his readers up with the possibility that this may be somewhat autobiographical by telling us information he provides his creative writing students, and then writes in third person, always referring to main character as the father, which, to a degree, makes sense, if it was autobiographical and he was trying to provide some distance between any truths, and the main truth that snakes its way through the story is abortion, The novel opens with the couple deciding to abort after learning the fetus wouldn't have much of a chance to live, and then a few years later they have a son, and the father is always wondering if he will ever mention his sister, the sister that was aborted. Teachers suggest the boy should be tested, that he seems a bit off, and they learn that he's both highly-intelligent and challenged, and that he, like so many others, may fit somewhere on the spectrum. They place the boy in a school they like more, and little by little, the boy who started life with so many coordination problems later juggles, scales walls, and the parents realize that he will leave home one day. But throughout the novel, the father remembers the abortion and becomes a volunteer escort at a clinic, immersing himself into the clinic and his anger with anti-abortionists. There's great humor and wry insight in this humanely gem of a novel.

Five stars! All of the stars! This magnificent book is about fatherhood and choices and consequences. The writing made me smile so often and also tear up moved by the beauty of the author's descriptions of parenting and being a father, spouse, and son. I will be purchasing this for my friends. Gorgeous! Thank you to NetGalley, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Peter Ho Davies for this ARC. I am so grateful.

The family characters don’t have names. They are the mother, the father, the son, the grandfather, etc. I felt no connection to them because they were merely cardboard.
I was hoping this book would have some depth and feeling, but it had neither. The only good thing is that it was short.

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!

A deeply moving and personal story about the most intimate of choices. I thought that this was an incredibly beautifully written novel and heartbreaking in every detail.

Peter Ho Davies teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan, and has several prestigious awards to his credit. His writing style is unique and often abbreviated. It might not be for everyone, but I love it. He writes with humor and honesty about difficult—and often polarizing—subjects. He covers abortion, autism, porn, infidelity, shame, regret and grief. He also intricately portrays the wobbly marital life that results from parenthood. Because he’s so spot on, I wonder if perhaps portions of this book are autobiographical?

What’s interesting about Davies’ work is that his narrator, the father, is unnamed as is his spouse (“the mother) and his son (“the boy”). It’s as if he keeps us at a distance from the characters who must go through such trauma, including the regret and grief surrounding their “virtuous abortion.” Then we witness the testing and physical rehabilitation of the second child (“the boy”) who’s developmentally behind (and presumed to be autistic).

Much of this novel is about shame, which is why the book’s title is so fitting. It stems from the quote, “Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself,” written by Anais Nin (“herself the author of several abortions.”)

“But what is it’s not a lie?” our unnamed narrator asks. “And what if that someone is you?”

“Abortion is shameful, because pregnancy is shameful, because sex is shameful, because periods are shameful. It almost makes me relieved we had a boy,” the wife says.

As a recent first-time parent, I can totally relate to the angst and stress of baby making, testing and all of the second-guessing that comes from child rearing. Even the strongest of marriages take a toll, and Davies shines a bright spotlight on the issues of parenthood.

“A friend once told him, ‘I used to think we got married for sex. Now I think we have sex to stay married, just so we don’t bite each other’s heads off.’ It reminds him of that other wry couplet: Some people get married to have kids; some people have kids to stay married. He wonders which they are.”

As you can tell from the subject matter, this is not an breezy read. But it’s a tightly edited page turner. Gratefully, there’s just enough dark humor mixed in to keep us from crying.

Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for an advanced copy of this book, via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review.

This is a novel about fatherhood, and about the joys and challenges of raising a child, told through the eyes of a professor as he experiences a tidal wave of parental emotions. It’s also a story of abortion, the complexities of marriage, and the impossible decisions presented by both. Sparely yet brilliantly written, each paragraph holds a new revelation about the miracle and tragedy of human life. I'm not a parent and don't intend to be, yet this book moved me to tears. I imagine it hits even harder for parents!

This novel about an unnamed couple and their unnamed son resonates not only because of the difficult subject matter but also because it addresses challenging parenting issues from the perspective of the father. When the couple is told that their unborn child has a genetic condition, they struggle with the decision to have an abortion and later with shame. A second pregnancy, which should have been joyous, is burdened with worry, which never abates. They don't want to test their son, who is different from the other children but ultimately realize it will benefit him. That's a simplistic recounting of the plot but this is more than that- it's a beautifully written meditation on the uncertainty of parenthood. I suspect there may be some who view the actions of the parents with a political lens but please read this for what it is. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. Not an easy read but a worthy one.

This wasn't for me. The writing didn't work and the blogger style of recollection was just too messy.
I found myself truly not caring about this family at all.

The blurb sounded good and sparked my interest. Unfortunately the book itself doesn't live up to the blurb.

I had a hard time reading this story not because of the content but because of the writing style and how it didn't seem to go anywhere. I finished the book and I'm still not completely sure what I just read or why.

I have enjoyed Peter Ho Davies work in the past and will read him again in the future but I found this work extremely triggering and difficult to read, and would have appreciated a more explicit content warning.