True Story – Kate Reed Petty

I’m not ashamed to admit it: True Story is a book I bought for the cover. But it’s brilliant, look at it! It features four different versions of a book cover for the story contained within, each with it’s own distinct Vibe. The story could be nostalgic, or horror, or Americana, or earnestly contemporary. A glance at the blurb will give you some clues, but really you have to read it to find out what you’re getting.

True Story traces the fallout of a high-school rumour as it reverberates throughout the lives of the subject, the perpetrators, and the onlookers. It sounds simple enough, but it’s actually a wonderfully complex interrogation of who gets to tell stories and who gets to decide if they are true.

The story is told in roughly chronological order, with flashbacks and fantasies that flesh out the timeline. It begins with an Incident at Maryland high-school in 1999. I’d imagine most high-schools have an Incident of the type depicted in the novel: a girl gets far too drunk at a party and two boys drive her home, only to brag to their friends later that they sexually assaulted her (only they frame it as ‘a bit of fun’ rather than a crime). Rumours spread, the boys deny any allegations of impropriety, and it’s successfully swept under the rug – or so everyone thinks.

The girl, Alice, does her best to put the past behind her, but finds herself trapped in traumatic patterns of exploitation. She falls in love with a man who abuses and controls her, she recoils from a friend who urges her to ‘tell her story’, she is hired to work for a man who has ulterior motives. She’s trapped between the struggle to remember the true story of what happened that night, and the struggle to forget that it happened at all.

Her story is revealed alongside that of Nick. He wasn’t one of the boys in the car, but he was a bystander of sorts, one who heard the rumour straight from the source and helped his friends in the car cover it up. His future looks bright initially, but quickly descends into alcoholic chaos.

From the very first page, True Story evokes Chanel Miller’s incredible memoir, Know My Name. Of course, that’s a memoir about a true story of sexual assault that made headlines around the world, while True Story is a relatively quiet metafictional novel that experiments with form, but they have a lot in common. They both highlight the unreliability of memory, how it’s weaponised against victims and exculpatory for perpetrators, and contrast it with the simple power of narrative. The ‘truth’ of a story almost doesn’t matter in the shadow of a more powerful story that fulfills our preconceived expectations. Who gets to tell the story of what happens to us? Who gets to decide which version is the most truthful? Chanel Miller and Kate Reed Petty have a lot of answers to these complex questions.

The other book that True Story evokes for me, though it didn’t occur to me until later, is Carmen Maria Machado’s equally-brilliant In The Dream House. Both experiment wildly with form, switching up the style and perspective – not just for fun, but as a mechanism to inform our understanding of the story. True Story is, at turns, a campus drama, a psychological thriller, an epistolary novel, a crime noir, and a metafictional puzzle. There are fantastical elements with ghosts and monsters, there are essay drafts with revealing iterations, there are film scripts that lay out the action and dialogue of key scenes. And yet, it all reads smoothly, with clear transitions and clever links – remarkably well done for a writer at any stage in their career, let alone Petty in her debut.

And the ending… wow. Just wow. I won’t spoil it, but I will say that even if none of the above particularly appeals to you, you should still read True Story and persist right through to the final page.

True Story is complex and clever. It’s also intense, scary, sad, insightful, nauseating and confronting, and yet it manages to be an enjoyable read in the sense that a boxing match is enjoyable to watch. If you can stomach the violence and fall-out, you get to witness the majesty of talent and strength play out before you. I highly recommend it (with the caveat of trigger warnings for sexual assault, abuse, coercive control, violence against both humans and animals, and alcoholism).

My favourite Amazon reviews of True Story:

• “Teenagers are terrible people and do stupid things for popularity and inclusion. In this case one of those stupid things follows a lacrosse team and their groupies into middle age.” – Teresa Freeman
• “Heads up – a cat is abused, just for the dumb old foreshadowing again and not for any reason that is new and inventive, first-novel-ish, or whatever else the NYT has said.” – MisterPlow
• “Kate Reed Petty must have blown away every English teacher she ever had. I’m sure their mouths plopped open while they read her essays and furtively gazed at her from behind their desks, imagining her shooting upwards to literary fame like Neil Armstrong shot up to the moon in Apollo 11… If you yearn for literary characters that rival Meryl Streep in their authenticity and a plot like an Alfa Romeo careening around a steep mountain pass look no further.” – Alyssa Donati