Where is the line between truth and deception? Fact and fiction? Those are some of the big questions author Sarah Viren tackles in her new memoir, "To Name the Bigger Lie."
Viren is a professor of creative writing at Arizona State University, where her wife, Marta, teaches as well. Their lives were derailed when they find out Marta was being investigated under Title IX for sexual misconduct.
While she knew the allegations against her must be lies, her increasingly desperate attempts to prove their innocence made Viren question everything — even what she knows to be true.
Eventually, she uncovered the person behind the accusations: a man who was competing with Viren for a professor job at the University of Michigan. But proving that becomes something else entirely.
The Show spoke with Viren about the book.
Full conversation
SARAH VIREN: My wife, who also works at ASU, got an email from someone who we still don't know who this person is, but this person reached out and let us know that people were writing about Marta on Reddit, on the ASU Reddit page, and saying that she was under investigation for a Title IX violation.
LAUREN GILGER: What did you think about it when you started to dig into this, like looking at those posts, looking at them as anonymous, right? But the things that they said, it sounds like it was pretty clear right away to you that this was suspicious.
VIREN: Yeah, you know, from the start, it all felt invented and kind of surreal. I kept feeling like I would wake up from a dream, but the longer it lasted and the more complicated it got in the subsequent days. We found out that Marta was, in fact, under a Title IX investigation. And then we found out that another university where we were being considered for a job had received emails about her saying that she was under investigation.
So the more evidence that piled up regarding this story, the more worried I got, and the more real it started to feel, even as I knew that there was no way it could be true.
GILGER: Yeah. OK, so let's talk about what a Title IX investigation means, right? Like this is kind of commonplace in universities, but lots of people are not familiar with that, and it has big implications in terms of how the investigation plays out. Like this is not like a legal investigation in a court of law, right? There's some differences.
VIREN: Right. So Title IX is essentially an education law that was passed to make sure that gender is not a factor in the quality of education you receive. And at its start it was mostly focused on sports, but over the years, it's changed a little bit, and especially when we started to realize that there was a real problem with sexual assault on college campuses.
The law was more broadly interpreted to allow for investigations when universities became aware that students were being sexually harassed, sexually assaulted, or facing any sort of sexual misconduct, and the idea was that universities should be responsible for that. They shouldn't allow those sorts of things to happen.
So what happens in a Title IX investigation is usually that university receives some sort of complaint and they investigate it, and the entire investigation is administrative. And that the results could be that there's some sort of repercussion for the employee if an employee is involved, or for students, students can, at some times, be suspended. There's different sort of repercussions for them if they're involved and found, quote, unquote, guilty.
GILGER: Did you ever expect this to kind of come home to your own family though?
VIREN: No, no. I mean, I think that you know, my experience with Title IX had always been thinking to myself as one of these reporters, thinking that perhaps my students might be facing a situation that needed to be reported, that I needed to find resources for them. That's always the relationship that I had with Title IX.
You know, in some ways I was, I think, abstractly or intellectually, I was indebted to it, because I know that title nine has now made it illegal for me to be harassed, you know, as an educator or as a student, and has allowed for those sort of protections that people like my mom or generations before didn't have. So I was very aware of that intellectually, but I never, ever, ever thought that I could be on the other end of a Title IX investigation.
And it wasn't until this all happened that I realized how few protections there are for those that have been accused, because this is not in a court of law. It's not working the way that a case would in the court of law. And so we were even told at some point that we couldn't have a lawyer present, which I later was not, was heard, was not true, but the ability to sort of defend yourself within that system is a lot more difficult than I realized.
GILGER: Yeah, tell us a little bit about the sort of personal implications of this, like for your family, like, I mean, you had to go through this process. It was, I'm sure, incredibly, as you said, surreal, is the first word that came to mind. But how did this affect your family, your relationships?
VIREN: What started to happen during that process of the investigation is that I began to doubt Marta and then also myself. There were a couple key moments, one in which I started to doubt my own memory, when one sort of element or fact that was part of the investigation lined up with something that was actually real. In real life, it confused me in this way that was really bewildering. And for a moment I doubted myself in a way that felt completely surreal.
And then I also doubted Marta at the beginning, the start, I never doubted her. I thought most of the accusations didn't make sense, but the longer it lasted, the more I began to have these sort of nagging doubts that I would be able to know when I thought about them, I would know they weren't valid. I would know that I could trust I could know I could trust myself, but I still found myself falling into moments of doubt that were probably the scariest part.
GILGER: So at the same time, this book is also about your own story, right? About your almost coming of age story. You weave iT in a really interesting way. This, this teacher that you had in high school, a philosophy teacher who sort of, it sounds like affected the way that you ended up looking at this and you were writing a book about him, it sounds like when you when this all happened. How did this tie together?
VIREN: So when this all happened I was in the middle of a book about this teacher, my philosophy teacher in high school, who had really influenced the way I thought about the world and my interest in what is true and what is real. But had started teaching conspiracy theories about halfway through my high school education in a way that was similarly bewildering.
So I was already thinking about those questions of like, what happens when somebody manipulates what is real or what is true? What happens when somebody lies? How do we deal with that? And so when this experience happened with Marta and me, when we were falsely accused in the middle of that, I just started to feel a similar sort of bewilderment that I felt and a similar sort of fear that I felt in high school when I was trapped by that that teachers manipulations and lies.
And so I decided that the two stories would be helpful if they were told together. I thought there was a way in which if I explored my teacher, and what he did that might also help me understand the man that I call Jay in the book, and what he did to Marta and me 25 years later.
GILGER: So as you said, it's sort of you're getting at these bigger questions about truth and lies, fact and fiction, sort of the lines between those two that can be blurred, which is coming from me as a journalist, a really interesting question to be asked, because it seems as if facts are facts, but that starts to not be true at a certain point.
What did you find about that? Like, did you come to any broader conclusions about the nature of these very maybe misunderstood ideas?
VIREN: Yeah. I mean, I think one realization I had during the Title IX investigation process, actually, was that I realized that facts are facts, but the way in which you arrange them to tell a story makes a big difference. And that something we don't always talk about when we're talking about re-establishing truth or affirming the facts, is that within that is a story.
And so I think the two stories together made me think a lot about that, and think a lot about how I wanted to tell a story, but what it means for the way that we tell stories, whether we're journalists or fiction writers or Morris. You know, my experiences were really distinct, but everybody I know has been at some point trapped by lies, or had somebody lie to them, or just sort of experienced what I think a lot of us are experiencing right now, which is this sense that we're not quite sure what's true.
And so I think that experience is so common, I really wanted to write about my own experience of grappling with those lies and manipulations and figuring out how to not necessarily break free from them, but how to sort of establish my own sense of self and stability within those.
