Someday Your Children Will See All These Lies

And they will know who you were.

The original title of my last novel The Time Has Come was Tumultuous Times, and while I was eventually, and reluctantly, persuaded to change it, in retrospect, I’m pretty sure we should have stuck with Tumultuous Times. (The argument was that the word “tumultuous” was too complex and challenging to people to put in the title of a book, which I suppose I would understand more if we hadn’t replaced it with a title that oozes “result of a committee compromising.” I stood my ground more firmly this time for Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride.) Tumultuous Times captured what the book was about — random people trying to survive an impossible, terrifying situation they did nothing to cause and have no control over, a reasonable metaphor for what it feels like to be alive right now — and felt to me evocative of this particular moment. But it also was a title with an implicit nod to hope: If the times are currently tumultuous, the presumption is that someday, if we catch a break, they will be a little less so.

In the early days of this newsletter, back in February 2018, I wrote about watching Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War documentary and being taken aback by how little curiosity I’d always had about what my parents went through during that time. I mean, I knew the larger details — Dad enlisted but got…