I Know This Much Is True
Wally Lamb, 1998
Contemporary fiction Literary fiction
A twin brother's breakdown, a family's buried history, and one man's long climb toward forgiveness—told with the pace of a page-turner.
Feels like nostalgia and serenity. About family and memory.
A page from the book
What it took to make peace with the past and call it truth.
I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I’ve figured out. I know this much is true. Wally Lamb.Wally Lamb taught high school English in Connecticut for 25 years and later edited a collection of writing by incarcerated women.
Books that feel like this
More by Wally Lamb
She’s Come Undone
Wally Lamb, 1992
A lonely Connecticut girl grows up amid family secrets, television dreams and bottomless wanting, narrating her life with raw, comic honesty.
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Questions readers ask
- What is I Know This Much Is True like?
- Feels like nostalgia and serenity. About family and memory.
- What should I read after I Know This Much Is True?
- If you liked I Know This Much Is True, try Little House in the Big Woods (Laura Ingalls Wilder), Water for Elephants (Sara Gruen) and The Inheritance Games (Jennifer Lynn Barnes).
A taste of the feed
The moment you stop knowing your own age without counting.
When you are five, you know your age down to the month. Even in your twenties, you know how old you are. I’m twenty-three you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties, something strange starts to happen. It is a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I’m—you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you are not. You’re thirty-five. And then you’re bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it’s decades before you admit it.
Water for Elephants · Sara Gruen
A question about leaving, answered with damnation and a wine list.
Where are you going?” I asked him. After everything it has taken to get to this point, he couldn’t just walk away. “To hell, eventually,” Jameson answered. “Probably to the wine cellar, for now.
The Inheritance Games · Jennifer Lynn Barnes
When a powerful father becomes the source of all your limitations.
So what would you like me to do? Magic myself popular? Conjure myself into a new house? Transfigure myself into a better student? Just cast a spell, Dad, and change me into what you want me to be, okay? It’ll work better for both of us.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child · John Tiffany
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