I had a friend who told me once, “Journalists write about facts; novelists write about truth.” I have to think he knew what he was talking about: he was a reporter, after all, and understood how little his profession tended to advance human understanding.

Of course, that was in the Before Times, when journalists really did write about facts. At least in America: it was accepted wisdom that other countries didn’t have that luxury. The inaptly named Pravda, for example, wasn’t in the business of telling either facts or truths—the real stories came from documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union, from writers with names like Solzhenitsyn, Ratushinskaya, Sakharov.

I forget that, sometimes, and it bears remembering. What we are living through now in the United States, this liminal time filled with violence and exhaustion and despair—this is not new. Only to us. And it’s a strange kind of American Exceptionalism that assumed we were immune. As Lewis so clearly pointed out, it could happen here.

It has happened here.

I no longer doubt that sometime within the next four years and beyond we, too, will be entrusting our words to others outside of our closely kept borders who can bring them into the sunlight. I write genre fiction, mystery novels that are seemingly innocuous (to everyone but the fictional victim, of course), yet if you’ve read any of them you know they’re subversive in their own way, calling out prejudice and othering and bigotry; and my historical fiction highlights past mistakes and even horrors that we should be vowing to never repeat.

In other words, I write about truth. And truth is not exactly having a moment right now.

I join and volunteer for organizations—Authors Against Book Bans, Writers Against the War in Gaza—and I start conversations about how we can shake off the lethargy and impotence generated by our present circumstances. My efforts seem small.

And it seems that what is happening in America today is so multi-tentacled that all we can do is grasp one of those tentacles—as in the organizations I mentioned—and hope to hell that someone else is grasping the others. As Umberto Eco and others have noted, unlike Communism or social democracy, fascism isn’t really a stable, clearly defined political system. It does have some consistent features, such as a cult-like obsession with a dictator, praise for “masculinity” and violence, racism, misogyny, anti-socialism, and an emphasis on a mythic past (such as, for example, the Aryan race or the American frontier cowboy).

It’s those features we can call out, we can bring to life through our stories, and show the truths that stand behind them. That’s not a solution, of course; in some ways it’s a panacea to help us feel we have some small agency in all of this. I think of Hemingway, not just writing about the Spanish Civil War but actually joining in the fighting, and I envy the clarity his participation gave to his work.

But that was another time, and we’re called to respond to our own time, our own injustices. This year they’re not making heroes—or even saints—like the ones we’ve read about and admired. They lived in different worlds and summoned words suited to their times. We’re called to make something of the here and now, to make something that approximates truth out of the fear and the confusion and the lies, if for no other reason than to leave a record.

And perhaps, one day, the truth really will prevail.

Facts May Be Dead. The Truth Isn’t.

Just a Frivolous Interview