2019 National book award finalist

What You Have Heard Is True:
A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“Reading it will change you, perhaps forever.” – San Francisco Chronicle
“Astonishing, powerful, so important at this time.” – Margaret Atwood

What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman’s radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life.

“Haunting and indelible, urgent and timeless.”

- Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names

Carolyn Forché is twenty-seven when the mysterious stranger appears on her doorstep. The relative of a friend, he is a charming polymath with a mind as seemingly disordered as it is brilliant. She’s heard rumors from her friend about who he might be: a lone wolf, a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmer, but according to her, no one seemed to know for certain. He has driven from El Salvador to invite Forch to visit and learn about his country. Captivated for reasons she doesn’t fully understand, she accepts and becomes enmeshed in something beyond her comprehension.

Together they meet with high-ranking military officers, impoverished farm workers, and clergy desperately trying to assist the poor and keep the peace. These encounters are a part of his plan to educate her, but also to learn for himself just how close the country is to war. As priests and farm-workers are murdered and protest marches attacked, he is determined to save his country, and Forch is swept up in his work and in the lives of his friends. Pursued by death squads and sheltering in safe houses, the two forge a rich friendship, as she attempts to make sense of what she’s experiencing and establish a moral foothold amidst profound suffering. This is the powerful story of a poet’s experience in a country on the verge of war, and a journey toward social conscience in a perilous time.

“A riveting an essential account of a young woman’s political and human awakeing... As beautiful as it is painful to read.”

- Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl

“One recovered incident, person, landscape, and image at a time, the narrative advances, accruing tremendous authority and emotional power. It amounts to almost a shamanistic transmitting of Forché’s experience into our own…. What Leonel Gómez was really offering when he lured her down to El Salvador was the chance to become Carolyn Forché. Anyone who reads this magnificent memoir will partake of that luminous transformation.”

– The New York Times Book Review

“Her memoir traces her journey from political innocence to experience, and, in doing so, offers a model to others who might take the same journey . . . She remembers as much as possible, and the resulting memoir, once read, is difficult to forget.”

– The Atlantic

“Extraordinary . . . Written with a thriller writer’s knack for narrative tension and a poet’s gorgeous sentences and empathy . . . Though it took Forché half a lifetime to fully share what she saw — this time is also more cryptically recalled in her second book of poems, The Country Between Us(1982) — now is precisely when we need to see it.”

– NPR

“Forché vividly evokes her complex relationship with her mentor and with organizers, laborers, and religious leaders whose courage in the face of atrocity taught her ‘resistance to oppression begins when people realize deeply within themselves that something better is possible.'”

– The New Yorker

“Poets write the best memoirs, and Forché’s What You Have Heard is True is no exception. A lyrical and pristinely disturbing recounting . . . no less stunning than her poetry–sharp, unsparing, and never looking away.”

– VOX

“Gripping . . . ‘I could just as well write my poetry from the quiet of my own study, ‘ Forché writes, ‘but I had known since childhood that human suffering demanded a response, everywhere and always.’ A portrait of the artist as political and poetic ingenue, What You Have Heard Is True is just such a response, a riveting account of how she made good on that conviction. It bears eloquent witness to injustice and atrocity and to how observing them shaped a fearless poet.”

– The Washington Post