"A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself" by Peter Ho Davies

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself is an abortion book, but Davies is aware it's not a typical story. First, it's told from the father's perspective, an approach the narrator immediately feels is problematic. Secondly, the abortion is the end to a desired pregnancy of a married couple, chosen only because of tests indicating a strong possibility of severe abnormalities in the fetus. It's a "virtuous abortion," as one woman calls it in the novel. So how to write about abortion from a man's perspective? How to write about a rare type of abortion--an abortion most likely to be sympathized with but that still retains the shame our culture places on abortions more broadly? How to remain pro-choice while also feeling guilty about the decision to end the pregnancy?

Davies navigates all these questions through his unnamed father narrator, as the couple chooses to end the pregnancy and later have a second child. The abortion frames the opening of the novel, but much of it is spent in the childhood of the second child.

For parents there's many moments of recognition, but where other books might go more comedic ("Cheerios everywhere?!"), A Lie remains aware that the dominant feeling of parenthood is fear--perhaps even abject terror. Those fears change and adjust as our children do, but never go away. Davies recognizes too the toll parenthood takes on an individual and a marriage, without sugarcoating such truth under an unhelpful "they're only young once!" platitude.

At times, particularly toward the later half, the book does feel heavy-handed. It's understandable that the father would choose to volunteer at a clinic that provides abortions as an attempt at resolution, but when every moment--even years after the act--recalls the mixed feelings on the abortion, I wondered if some nuance was missing. Nevertheless, there's so much to Davies that's intimately relatable to any parent that I immediately recommended it to my husband. 

I called it an "abortion book" in my opening sentence, but that's an unfair characterization. It's a book about parenthood, about the many choices we make, and the many failures that follow. It's about the all-consuming nature of parenthood, the way our children's lives and likes and abilities and failures become our lives (and likes and abilities and failures).