The truths we tell about ourselves

September 20, 2026In an age where trends on social media are transient, I spent many years harbouring an enduring, even unhealthy, obsession with a term that was widely discussed after the Brexit referendum and Trump’s first stint as president.

Billed as Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year in 2016, ‘post-truth’ wasn’t just an adjective, but an indictment of the human condition. The term marked the death of objective facts and the dawn of an era where emotional appeals hold sway.

For almost a decade, this term became part of my everyday vocabulary, prompting me to inhabit the skin of a sceptic. Using ‘post-truth’ before any noun had morphed into a bad habit and, perhaps even, a tool of convenience.

It didn’t serve as just another compound adjective in phrases such as ‘post-truth realities’ or ‘post-truth politics’. Instead, it was a critical device through which I viewed the world and gauged its commitment to honesty.

As an avid reader, I’ve always found solace in the printed word, viewing it as a window into reality. Burdened by a post-truth lens, I’d become increasingly cynical about facts and insisted on subjecting them to scrutiny until I could find in them some semblance of a verifiable truth.

In those years, I was drawn more towards memoirs than autobiographical accounts. For most readers, the terms ‘autobiography’ and ‘memoir’ are used interchangeably. Life-writing, though, is a complex art, and it is difficult to rely on a single technique to chronicle the many shades and flavours of our lives.

Autobiographical texts benefit from the spirit of completeness as they attempt to portray the highs and lows of an individual’s entire life in vivid detail. Rooted in facts, formal autobiographies are believed to possess greater historical significance by critics owing to their objectivity and fearlessness.

However, memoirs tend to be far more selective in their scope, presenting only a snapshot of a person’s life. Even if they are fragmentary, memoirs are strengthened by their perceived subjectivity. Memoirists often rely on literary devices used by fiction writers to reconstruct a forgotten or, perhaps, vaguely remembered moment.

This shouldn’t be viewed as an attempt to fabricate information. Memory, as many of us will concur, is unreliable; it can elude us just as easily as it can whisper secrets into our ears.

Faced with such a wildly unpredictable beast, most memoir writers prefer to recreate the past based on hindsight, thereby viewing it from observations and reflections made in the present. As I grew increasingly suspicious of an inherently ‘post-truth’ world, autobiographies became anathema.

I was unapologetic about my aversion to them. Why wouldn’t I harbour suspicion about such fact-driven enterprises? In these harrowing times, when fake news haunts us like a spectre, information in all its forms is dangerous, akin to a life-threatening virus.

Trust, therefore, is an asset that is constantly losing value. Could I then trust autobiographies to provide me anything other than half-truths, vainglorious accounts of valour and self-congratulatory praise? Memoirs were safer as they didn’t disguise themselves behind a veneer of objectivity.

From the outset, they exposed their leanings, reminding me that I didn’t have a front-row seat to a game of deception. Memoirs weren’t afraid of the murkier space where facts lost ground and some form of fictionalising seemed integral.

They were, to me, an ideal map to navigate the doom and gloom of those post-truth realities I dreaded so much. Yet, as a storyteller, I couldn’t escape the pull of fiction, which opened a doorway into the lives of characters who were possibly based on real people.

Fascinated by the porous boundaries between fiction and life-writing, I read novels and short fiction based on the lives of their authors. In 2020, as the pandemic struck, I devoured Zeeba Sadiq's 38 Bahadurabad, a novel that skilfully welds fictional and autobiographical elements.

In this slim debut novel, the author attempts to understand Dr Sadiq, her beloved father, with whom she spent her early childhood years in the eponymous residence in Karachi. In a series of interconnected sketches that alternate between the first- and third-person voices, the author examines memories of her father from various angles.

The purpose of this exercise is to confront his paradoxical image as an upstanding family man who once abandoned his first family in England. While 38 Bahadurabad is often categorised as fiction, the unique treatment of its autobiographical strands renders this book a fascinating exploration of how fact can be presented in life-writing.

For instance, Zeeba Sadiq frequently uses humour as a crutch to evade uncomfortable conversations or painful epiphanies about Dr Sadiq’s life. At the same time, she relies on narrative foils to reveal her father's unique attributes.

In this novel, facts aren't overlooked; they are merely scrutinised and presented in a palatable form. British-Pakistani author Aamer Hussein's short stories were my truest companions as I negotiated the dilemmas of a post-truth world.

For decades, his work has navigated the flexible boundaries between fiction and autobiography to advantage. The author often examines events from his own life, such as a cancer diagnosis and his experience with grief, through a fictional lens.

For instance, ‘The Garden Spy’ introduces us to a narrator who copes with loss, cancer and the uneasy solitude of Covid-19 lockdown. In his exclusively memoir pieces, Hussein fashions himself as an onlooker who comes alive on the page through the people, places and eras he evokes.

'Words and Music’ hearkens back to the 1960s when a young Hussein discovers that Pakistani film actor Shamim Ara is his neighbour in Karachi. This memory is a catalyst through which the author evokes a bygone era when he developed a fascination with film songs and poetry.

‘Uncle Rafi’ offers a glimpse of the brief literary career of the author’s maternal granduncle. ‘Teacher’ portrays Hussein as an eager student to purple-robed Shah Sahab, an Urdu teacher he encountered in London at a pivotal stage in his life.

‘Suyin: A Friendship’ pays homage to Chinese-born Eurasian author Han Suyin. As Hussein’s close friend, she urged him to explore the inner rhythm of his mother tongue whenever he put pen to paper. Even so, as a literary critic, I found myself reading and interpreting conventional autobiographical works, and deriving an unexpected joy from their formalistic spirit.

It was through these reviewing assignments that my faith in facts was ultimately restored. However, I didn’t simply rebuild my trust; I simply learnt to accept their claim to objectivity while recognising that they may not paint a complete portrait.

As a reader, I swiftly began taming the instinct to blindly trust information. Instead, I chose to embrace facts as a version of reality instead of the unvarnished truth. The techniques adopted by some authors of autobiographical texts helped me analyse the ways in which facts were being handled.

Scholar and former diplomat Masuma Hasan’s Pakistan in an Age of Turbulence didn't strike me as a typical autobiography. Using sound research and objectivity as a weapon, she situated her story against Pakistan's broader political context.

What emerges from this account is a captivating story of a woman who remained an insider within the power corridors and rose to a position of prominence in the Civil Service. Hasan neither boasts about her achievements nor sugarcoats realities – qualities that render her memoir all the more neutral.

At first glance, Shahbaz Taseer's Lost to the World: A Memoir of Faith, Family and Five Years in Terrorist Captivity could be viewed as a memoir rather than a strictly autobiographical text. The text stands out for effortlessly straddling objective truth and subjective reality.

Taseer's memoir came through as poignant because he didn't shy away from exploring the emotional turmoil he encountered during his confinement. As a consequence, Lost to the World moves beyond reportage and shines a revealing light on the tumultuous years the author spent in captivity.

Similarly, Mukhtar Husain's Foundations and Form: Memoirs of a Pakistani Architect offers a dispassionate, well-modulated account of a life with clinical precision. Relying on subheadings, the narrative reproduces every facet of the author's life, leaving little room for gaps and blind spots.

Above all, the book offers a compelling social history of Karachi from the 1950s to the contemporary moment, which suggests that life-writing doesn’t have to be a self-centred endeavour. My reservations about autobiographical texts in a post-truth era were somewhat allayed when Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022.

Ernaux clinched the coveted award for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. Curiously enough, she is known to have pioneered “autosociobiography”, a literary genre that views the personal memoir as a portal of sorts into the broader structures of society.

Her expansive oeuvre boasts stellar examples of texts that bypass her private emotions and use her experiences as case studies of how women’s bodies and desires are policed by society. In Happening, Ernaux draws an intimate line of connection between her clandestine abortion and class constraints and institutional pressures in France of the 1960s.

Simple Passion turns an intimate gaze on an intense love affair and reveals how social pressure dictates women’s romantic interactions. Since then, I have made a conscious effort to understand the motivations of autobiographical writers in the hope that they will help me erase all my doubts about facts in a post-truth world.

“Autobiographies are interesting to read,” novelist, translator and memoirist Rehana Alam says. “But only those people who have unique lives in some way or who can shed light on world events from exceptional perspectives.”Memoirs, she believes, allow authors “the latitude to write about only remarkable periods of their lives and not to chronicle the entire span from birth onward.”

Her own memoir, My Life as a Corporate Gypsy, spans the nearly three decades when she and her family moved across four continents owing to her husband’s job. This is her third book and first autobiographical work.

Captivating, enriching and emotionally resonant, Alam’s memoir traces the contours of her peripatetic life, revealing its many moments of turbulence and tranquility. Yet, this is not a conventional travel memoir peppered with cliched reminiscences. Within its pages emerges a tableau of how one can fashion homes in foreign lands through successive relocations.

“That time [in our lives, which was] one of great adventure and adaptation for us, also delineates a method of doing business by multinational corporations which has now been abandoned,” Alam says. Her words are a comforting reminder of how memoirs embody both individual and collective realities.

At times, memories elude us and authors have to rely on diary entries for guidance. Alam, though, possesses an almost photographic memory of key events. “The dates of our sojourn in the various countries [are] etched on my mind together with the outstanding experiences and anecdotes of those periods,” she says.

“Diaries and notes were not needed to write my memoir.”Much like Alam, Talat Rahim wrote other books before venturing into life-writing. "I chose to write my memoir after I had written four books on other people," she says.

Rahim wrote about bureaucrats, divorcees, hypocrites and even published a book of 22 interviews with people from India and Pakistan. All of these books were steered by factual accounts. Her publisher once referred to Rahim as "a very unusual woman" who spends her time talking and writing about other people.

"That really got my goat," she says. "I braced myself to write my own story, published under the title I Did It My Way: My Life Uncensored. "Shifting gears came with its own challenges.

"It takes a lot of courage to write with a no-holds-barred attitude," Rahim asserts. "I was afraid people would not be interested in my story, but this was the only story I had withheld and not talked about earlier.

"Despite her initial reservations, Rahim wasn't plagued by writer's block, but felt some sections were "tough to write". "I would stop midway with the question of the intrinsic worth of such a book," Rahim says.

"Nonetheless, I decided for my own amusement to write about incidents I could recall as I went down memory lane. I spoke of myself and the very eventful and unusual life I have led, [which was] so different from [those of] my contemporaries who were all married after graduation, had babies and are now grandmothers.

"Unlike her peers, Rahim married late, had no children and lost her husband. She worked with, and for, bureaucrats for 25 years, and travelled the world at "government expense". "After taking a golden handshake from government service, [I] started to write books and published In 2023, I wrote my memoir.

"Rahim confesses that she has never maintained a diary in her life. "The Almighty has bestowed me with an elephant's memory," she proudly declares. "My memoir records interesting details of a well-lived life, all from memory!

"The underlying purpose of Rahim's memoir is to encourage women "to learn and understand how to live life on their own terms". “I don't want them to be bogged down by that very distasteful remark, 'What will people say?

'," Rahim says. Her creative vision reaffirms the fact that memoirs are more than just a document of personal victories; they can also serve the collective good. As I plumb the depths of the autobiographer’s mind, it gradually dawns on me that my concerns about post-truth realities are a bit extreme, if not entirely trivial.

Facts aren’t ghoulish entities we must fear; they are a potent force we must actively confront. The writer is a critically acclaimed author. All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer.

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