REALLY REAL

Though really, the husband said, the strangest thing was that she wasn’t a reader, not really, and she definitely wasn’t a writer. Not that the alleged racism and stereotyping didn’t bother him, he immediately added—they did—but that it was strange to think she had been writing this book, any book, at all. She owned books, but he’d never seen her reading one, and, frankly, they were the kind of books one usually saw only in furniture stores and thrift shops, bought because of the color of their covers—though, look, he himself didn’t really read, either, so it wasn’t that he was judging, just that he was surprised, really surprised, by the whole thing. She just wasn’t . . . the type. This part of her didn’t really seem like her to him. The memoir was, at the time, on the New York Times Bestseller List; oddly, it had made its first appearance there the week after questions about its authenticity had come out and been answered. The reporter wondered whether the unmasking had really been strategy on the part of the man’s wife, or on the part of her publisher. I don’t have any idea, he said, the whole thing just seems bizarre to me. I really can’t imagine it, not at all. She works for DCF, he said; she works with kids and their parents. He’d been to her office. He’d seen it, seen her, met her coworkers. She spent most of her time at home scrolling through Facebook and Instagram and watching television. He’d have heard her typing, wouldn’t he? She sometimes did yoga, though not exactly regularly. She had gone through a phase where she was crocheting a lot, then she stopped. Wait! She was part of a book club, once. But even then, he’d never seen her reading the books, couldn’t remember what the books would have been—was there one by Amy Tan? or James Frey, maybe? it was around that time—and she’d always said it was really just an excuse to drink wine with a couple of her coworkers and their friends. Whatever. She had not grown up poor in the Nickel, he said, she was not even from Houston, or Texas. As far as he knew. (He hadn’t even known what the Nickel was until all of this came out.) She definitely hadn’t been a stripper, and she hadn’t been adopted—well, he thought—I mean, he said, she looks almost exactly like her sister, and they both look a lot like their mother, at least, well, in certain ways, the man said, I mean, I don’t know. What if I just thought they looked like their mother because I thought she was their mother, their biological mother, I mean. You know? The reporter, assuming this was a rhetorical question, didn’t reply. Though neither the man nor the reporter knew it, the man’s wife was, at that very moment, across town, being interviewed by a so-called Twitter morning show, an account that broadcast every weekday morning to its over 100,000 followers—it would later come out that at least 25,000 (and, it was implied, likely many more) of these followers were, in fact, Russian bots created for what the press was calling smokescreening, the practice of crowding social media with memes and hashtags on days when news came out that was unfavorable to the government. The one that had been trending the day of the interview—also the day the president’s nephew had been arrested—was #AddAWordRuinABook. On the set of this Twitter morning show (and before the news about the Russian bots had come out), the host passed his phone over to the woman, asking her to read some of the tweets. Stuffed Animal Farm, she read. The Call Center of the Wild. The Book of Mormon Underwear. The Dumb Bible. When she got to the one that had been taken from her own book’s title, she first laughed nervously, then, after the host asked her a second time to read it, please, read it out loud, she immediately started crying. Why are you crying, the host asked? I wish people out there knew how much all of this hurts, the woman said. I wish they knew what it is like to have to go through this. I’m a real person, she said. I have real feelings.

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