Still True

When it comes to writing, I know my role. I'm a genre hack, a storyteller who wants to make people have a little fun while reading, but not someone who's putting out literature that people would use big words like “important” or “poignant” to describe. I basically write mysteries with gratuitous one-liners and a decent payoff at the end. In my college writing classes, my professors always pushed me toward literary fiction. That was the gold prize. That was where your true worth as a writer would be measured. They told us that genre fiction was beneath “good writers,” and that we should concentrate on telling human stories in human settings. I doubled down on my dragon-fighter and private eye stories because those were what interested me. And besides, I knew my role, and I knew I was not, and probably would never be, a good enough writer to engage readers on the level of literary fiction. I needed my gimmicks, my structures, and a handful of known tropes to lean on. I couldn't just tell a human story. (Maybe that's because I've always felt like I'm missing some of the components that make us truly human, but that's an issue for a different therapist.)

Maggie Ginsberg is a writer who can engage the human condition and make important and poignant commentary on the deepest issues that affect us all. In STILL TRUE, Ginsberg does battle with big issues like loss, isolation, grief, strength, and weakness. She digs at the uncomfortable lies we tell ourselves and the deepest secrets that we don't tell others. She examines distance in relationships, and how even married couples can have miles between them no matter how close they think they feel. She also finds an undercurrent of being needed. Of feeling valued. And of finding a place in this world when our original plans fall apart and our original places reject us.

I have never been a fan of literary fiction because I find so much of it so deeply pretentious. It always feels like authors are digging too deeply in their toolboxes for the tricks that will make people think they are some sort of genius wordsmith. Ginsberg is able to craft art with simple phrases, but there is no shortage of poetry in her construction. With a few paragraphs, she can bring life to vibrant, living color in your mind and keep you questioning the characters' intentions and personal shortcomings.

STILL TRUE is the kind of book you read in a single day, a simple story on the surface, but one whose true depth is hidden behind layers of nuance and humanity. It's also the kind of story that you will dwell on while you look around at your friends and family with new eyes wondering what sort of secrets are they hiding that are currently keeping them from experiencing life to its fullest.

A desperately intriguing tale of real people despite its label as being “fiction.”

A masterful, lyrical novel set in rural Wisconsin, Still True tells a simple story of complex characters whose lives interweave in poignant, engaging ways. Jack and Lib have been married thirty years and are still passionately in love, though each maintains a separate home miles apart. Claire, Dan, and their boy Charlie are new residents of the small town and Claire is suffocating in a marriage that has sapped her spark for life, as she turns increasingly to alcohol to shut down the voices inside her head telling her there is more to life than this. And then the inevitable stranger comes to town in the form of Matt, Lib's son, whom she abandoned forty years before and has hidden from Jack all this time.

I gave myself the luxury of reading only a few chapters of this wonderful book a night, hoping this story would never end but just go on spooling out, filling my thoughts, touching my emotions, feeding me bit by bit the saga of these endearing, enduring people who came to mean so much to me. Very little “happens” in the sense of dramatic action scenes, yet in the way of great literature, everything does—jealousy, hurt, joy, connection, comfort, rage, and ultimately forgiveness.

If you're a reader who's tired of characters who come off as caricatures, plots too convoluted to ring true, and stories that veer away from exploring genuine human emotions in favor of off-the-cuff superficial fluff, this is the book for you. And if you're a fan of Larry Watson, William Kent Krueger, and loved Chris Whitaker's We Begin at the End, this belongs on your TBR list.

Merged review:

A masterful, lyrical novel set in rural Wisconsin, Still True tells a simple story of complex characters whose lives interweave in poignant, engaging ways. Jack and Lib have been married thirty years and are still passionately in love, though each maintains a separate home miles apart. Claire, Dan, and their boy Charlie are new residents of the small town and Claire is suffocating in a marriage that has sapped her spark for life, as she turns increasingly to alcohol to shut down the voices inside her head telling her there is more to life than this. And then the inevitable stranger comes to town in the form of Matt, Lib's son, whom she abandoned forty years before and has hidden from Jack all this time.

I gave myself the luxury of reading only a few chapters of this wonderful book a night, hoping this story would never end but just go on spooling out, filling my thoughts, touching my emotions, feeding me bit by bit the saga of these endearing, enduring people who came to mean so much to me. In a sense, very little happens in the sense of dramatic action scenes, yet in the way of great literature, everything does—jealousy, hurt, joy, connection, comfort, rage, connection, and ultimately forgiveness.

If you're a reader who's tired of characters who come off as caricatures, plots too convoluted to ring true, and stories that veer away from exploring genuine human emotions in favor of off-the-cuff superficial fluff, this is not the book for you. But if you're a fan of Larry Watson, William Kent Krueger, and loved Chris Whitaker's We Begin at the End, this belongs on your TBR list.