On Lying About Reading, or: How I Learned That Stieg Larsson Is Good, Actually

The night I lied about Stieg Larsson I was working the front desk of a yoga studio. There is a culture of friendly detachment there; we are a big staff, and everyone is very part time. As a result, the staff and the clients don’t know each other well and there is a lot of mystery in terms of what everyone cares about besides yoga. This never really bothered me until the night I lied. It is not of particular interest in that space that my life revolves around books; that I spend most of my time reading books, teaching books and trying to write books and it is usually a blessed reprieve from that obsession when I’m at the studio.

But when one of our regulars arrived breathless for the 7:30 slow flow explaining she was caught up reading The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo and lost track of time, she just had to know who the killer was, and had I ever read it? that I felt my other life, my real life threatened. It was the first time someone had asked me about a book at the studio and I was desperate to signal that I was a reader.

I’ve known one compulsive liar for many years. His lies started out totally banal. I knew he’d dropped out of college but whenever I saw him, he’d tell me about all the classes he was taking, not realizing he was listing several more courses than anyone would take in a semester. This made sense. He was self-conscious about not being in school, and I didn’t call him out. Eventually his lies escalated to him claiming to run a multimillion-dollar website building company (that he can’t tell anyone the name of) and is constantly refusing to sell despite tempting offers.

I believe this happened because the lies began as things that were so close to true, he felt no qualms about saying them. When no one challenged him, it became an acceptable way to move through the world. To say things that you could imagine doing as if you were already doing them. I believe there is a similar insidiousness attached to lying about reading. We lie about reading, watching, and listening to stuff because it’s totally within our grasp. We can conceive of the experience, but there is a profound difference between doing something and understanding that we could.

To lie about The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo has other significant implications. Because it was popular a decade ago, it didn’t occur to me as wholly inaccurate that I hadn’t read it. Hadn’t I basically absorbed it through cultural osmosis? And didn’t I, as a serious reader have the right to claim the thrilling page turner? In that split second decision to lie I thought I had earned the right to say I had read The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo because I’ve read so many things that no one has ever asked me about or will ever ask me about. And the fact that many other people have read that book but not other more “important” books that I’ve been busy reading, meant I could take credit for reading that as well.

The idea of possessing knowledge about texts we haven’t experienced extends beyond casually lying about culturally ubiquitous content. It is present in our broad dismissal of things as well, and our comfort with forming opinions on things we just don’t know about. For example, I was reading The Breast by Philip Roth recently and multiple people, who I love and trust, waved it away calling it “minor Roth” and a “skipper” though they’d never read a word of it. This is another way I could have reacted to Girl with The Dragon Tattoo because I didn’t think it was worth my time based on nothing but vibes. That I was above it as they were above reading The Breast (which was quite a good meditation on shock and grief from the point of a view of a man who woke up one day as a breast).

There is a kind of survival associated with lying about reading from school days. No matter how passionate a reader you were growing up, sometimes you simply had to lie about having read something to get by. This demonstrated savviness at school—the ability to write papers, participate in discussions and get good grades without having spent all that time reading something you were ordered to read. While this makes sense as a way of beating the system as kids, it becomes more insidious when you enter the adult world of discourse, criticism and connection with other people, which makes me wonder if the issue here is that we are asking each other the wrong questions.

Sometimes when one admits they haven’t read something “important,” a horrible thing happens. The other person might respond with, “you haven’t read The Goldfinch?!” which doesn’t inspire a reading of The Goldfinch or further the conversation. We are all guilty of this, of course. I did it recently when I found out my friend had never watched Mrs. Doubtfire and immediately felt like a jerk.

Because what are we trying to do when we ask if someone has read something? The best-case scenario is that we are trying to find common ground. But worst case, we are alienating each other and creating dead ends in conversation. If we have an idea or an observation to share from something we’ve read, we should go ahead and share it. If the person you are talking to has read the book, they’ll most likely tell you, and you can take it from there.

I recently picked up a copy of Girl with The Dragon Tattoo and brought it on a seven-hour bus ride from Philadelphia to Boston. It was a portal to another dimension on that bus; I was unfussed by the woman clipping her nails across the aisle and the bathroom door that flapped open and shut for three hundred miles. I loved reading the names of the Swedish towns, I loved the middle-aged polyamorists, I even grew to love the financial crime-talk I didn’t totally understand, but most of all I loved how the book was all about the importance of thorough research. How Blomkvist and Salander were good at what they did because they dedicated themselves completely to their subjects and spent days looking at the same old photograph to understand its significance.

When I finished the book, I stared out the window surer than ever of the absurdity of lying about reading something. What a sad disservice to oneself it is to falsify that experience. One moment of being perceived as well read is worth so much less than being held by a book, especially one that you didn’t expect to enjoy so much. On the other hand, there is something to be said for what we can learn from our lies.

When I lied about reading Larsson, I squeezed another lie in there as well. I told the yoga client my father and I read The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo together, and we both loved it. It is true that my father loves that book, but we have never read a book together. It reminds me of this thing Montaigne once said in his essay “Of Liars,” “If falsehood, like truth, had only one face, we would be in better shape. For we would take as certain the opposite of what the liar said. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field.”

In that one sentence, there was the insecurity of not being perceived as a reader, the permission to claim ownership over certain kinds of books, and a repressed desire to bond with my father over a book. I think I’ll give him a call.