It's to the best of our knowledge from PRX.

How hard is it to write the truth?

I think you can't be, no matter what, you can't be 100% honest.

Because we have fictions about our lives, who we are, what we do.

She knew she was writing fiction, and yet she clung to the idea that everything in the

books was all true. Can you trust memory to inform your own truth? I trust very little in my life.

So many people do that because they're afraid of the truth itself.

Denial, confusion, misrepresentation.

You don't even know what to say anymore.

That's the scariest thing about now.

I'm Anne Strange Champs, this hour, four writers on truth, fiction, and lies.

Wisconsin Public Radio.

It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. Remember the little house books?

Ma and Paw Ingalls? Laura and Mary, their dog Jack, growing up in the big woods, on the prairies.

I loved those books growing up.

Oh my God, no, not the TV show.

I hated that show.

There's Michael Landon and Ma looking so happy,

and here come the girls looking cleaner than any prairie girls would ever have looked.

Maybe your mother would let you wear your Sunday dress.

The wagon pulling into that immaculate town,

everybody's all happy and smiling.

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