I just finished True Story: Murder, Memoir and Mea Culpa.

It gives me the shivers.

And I just realized something as I typed in the title. Maybe I don't hate it anymore. Because the first two words are aggressively ironic, though I'm not sure they were intended that way. (The author opens by imploring us of the opposite.)

So much of it was maddeningly boring, but I have to admit it had a powerful payoff. The climax was unexpected (I won't spoil with any specifics), and more revolting than I could have imagined.

Throughout, though, I had a lot of intense distrust of and occasionally disgust for the author--interspersed with intense empathy. But the empathy only made me quiver, because this is the story of a master liar and manipulator, told by an admitted liar and manipulator, and the juxtaposition just made me horribly wary of people like him. What on earth was he thinking?

Maybe I'll feel better about him some day. He's probably a really nice guy, and I really want to believe him and like him--and totally expected to--but after watching how effortlessly and adroitly this murderer could fool everyone around him . . . I'm just not ready to.

Most of all, I just feel sickened by the lying. When you can't believe a person, can't trust them, what do you have? Everything that matters between two people--or between individuals and large groups or institutions like our schools or churches or governments--is based on what we know and believe to be true about them. On truth we take for granted. It's hard enough to know who to get close to, who to spend our time with and develop our feelings for when the truth is laid bare in front of us. When it's not, when a person is full of lies and deceit and deception, when that person shatters our trust in other people . . . That's just the most heinous crime I think they can commit to us. Ugh. Nothing ever ever ever makes me more unsettled than people who shake my ability to trust.