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By Wally Lamb
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Selection: 1998
What if you were a 40-year-old housepainter, horrifically abused, emotionally unavailable, and your identical twin
was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed in public self-mutilation? You'd either be a guest on the Jerry Springer
Show or Dominick Birdsey, the antihero, narrator, and bad-juju magnet of I Know This Much Is True. Somewhere in the
recesses of this hefty 912-page tome lurks an honest, moving account of one man's search, denial, and acceptance of
self. This is no easy feat considering his grandfather seemed to take parenting tips from the SS and his grandmother
was a possible teenage murderess, his stepfather a latent sadist, and his brother, Thomas, a politically motivated
psychopath. Not one to break with tradition, Dominick continues the dysfunctional legacy with rape, a failed marriage,
a nervous breakdown, SIDS, a car crash, and a racist conspiracy against a coworker--just to name a few.
A stretch, both literally and figuratively from his Oprah-christened bestseller, She's Come Undone, Lamb's book ventures
outside the confines of the tightly bound beach read and marathons through a detailed, neatly cataloged account of every
familial travesty and personal failure one can endure. At its heart lies Freud's "return of the repressed": the more we
try to deny who we are, the more we become what we fear. Lamb takes Freud's psychological abstraction to the realm of
everyday living, packing his novel with tender, believable dialogue and thoughtful observation.
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