I Know You Know Who I Am
Author: Peter Kispert
Publisher: Penguin Books
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Throughout this striking debut collection we meet characters who have lied, who have sometimes created elaborate falsehoods, and who now must cope with the way that those deceptions eat at the very fabric of their lives and relationships. In the title story, the narrator, desperate to save a love affair on the rocks, hires an actor to play a friend he invented in order to seem less lonely, after his boyfriend catches on to his compulsion for lying and demands to know this friend is real; in "Aim for the Heart", a man's lies about a hunting habit leave him with an unexpected deer carcass and the need to parse unsettling high school memories; in "Rorschach", a theater producer runs a show in which death row inmates are crucified in an on-stage rendering of the New Testament, while being haunted daily by an unrequited love and nightly by ghosts of his own creation.
In I Know You Know Who I Am, Kispert deftly explores deception and performance, the uneasiness of reconciling a queer identity with the wider world, and creates a sympathetic, often darkly humorous, portrait of characters searching for paths to intimacy, desperate for connection.
TL;DR Review
I Know You Know Who I Am is a gripping collection of short stories about gay men who cannot stop lying. It will draw you in, churn you up, and spit you out in the best way.
For you if: You are looking for a fantastic set of queer short stories that won’t leave you scratching your head, just feeling deeply.
Full Review
I read a fair number of short story collections, often ones filled with stories that end weirdly or require some interpretation. I like that kind of story a lot, but I Know You Know Who I Am is (refreshingly for me this time) not like that. Each story is about realistic people in (for the most part) realistic conundrums of their own making.
There are 21 stories of varying length in this 220-page book, some of which are only a single page long. It’s incredible what Kispert has managed to do in so few words, story after story.
Each features a gay man protagonist, usually grappling with the consequences of a lie (or many lies) that he told. Some of these men are chronic liars, some have accidentally let the situation get out of control, some are just budding into early adulthood and trying to find their way, some lie out of survival or necessity. But every single one of them is fascinating and relatable.
I’m not usually a fan of plots in the form of train wrecks you can’t look away from (they stress me out, lol), but in this case, I was constantly surprised by how invested I was in each story — no matter its length. That Kispert could create such a rich world in a (very) short story is, to me, the most impressive part about this book. And I was rooting for every single protagonist, even when their true colors were … less than great. I didn’t want it to end!
“How to Live Your Best Life” is probably the story from this collection that will stick with me longest (please message me if you have read it lol I need to talk), but it’s impossible to pick favorites here. Peter Kispert will probably become an auto-buy author for me, just so I can learn from his craft.
Trigger Warnings
Death / grief
Self-harm and suicide
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