The Lies They Told
The Lies They Told
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Ellen Marie Wiseman on The Lies They Told
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
A fact she couldn’t put downThe book that became ‘The Lies They Told’ was not planned. Wiseman was mid-research on ‘The Plum Tree’, a novel drawn from her German family’s wartime experiences, when she encountered a historical reversal that upended what she thought she understood about the origins of Nazi racial policy.
I first learned about eugenics while writing my debut novel, THE PLUM TREE, when I discovered that the United States was the first country in the world to undertake forced sterilization programs, and that the Nazi party in Germany took many of its policies, procedures, and theories from American eugenicists.
That first discovery did not become a book immediately. Two more novels intervened, both set inside asylums and institutions, and both kept returning her to the same historical source. The repetition became impossible to ignore.
As I continued research for two of my other novels, WHAT SHE LEFT BEHIND and THE LOST GIRLS OF WILLOWBROOK, which are about asylums and institutions, I kept uncovering more ties to this disturbing movement. So, crazy me, decided my next book should be about eugenics. But while researching and writing The Lies They Told, I could only begin to untangle the shocking web of the American eugenics movement — a dark chapter in our history that echoes many of the injustices we see in the world today.
By August 2022, while still on tour for ‘The Lost Girls of Willowbrook’, she was already describing the project publicly, framing the subject not as a historical curiosity but as an underestimated force in American life.
Right now I’m working on a novel centered on eugenics in America, which had a more profound effect on our lives than most people realize.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Q&A with Ellen Marie Wiseman”That description, measured and almost casual, came three years before the book would publish and land in a political moment she had not anticipated.
How she wrote it
Evidence that rewrote the openingThe Ellis Island prologue was not simply atmospheric. Wiseman needed to show that eugenicist logic was already operating at the port of entry, and the historical record gave her tests and procedures that required almost no embellishment to read as grotesque.
The American eugenicists stepped in to implement IQ tests with questions like — Is it better to sweep a staircase from the top to the bottom or the bottom to the top? And is this photograph a picture of a lady or a dog? They also implemented medical exams that measured noses and heads and ears. Following each examination, inspectors used chalk to draw symbols on the clothes of those who were suspected to be sick or ‘feeble-minded’ before they were sent for further examination, detained (sometimes in cages), institutionalized, or deported.
For the Virginia setting, the archive offered something more specific than Wiseman had anticipated. The Blue Ridge Mountain families displaced to create Shenandoah National Park left behind photographs, and those photographs had been weaponized against the very people they depicted.
Numerous mountain children who were photographed by Arthur Rothstein, including twelve children from one family, ended up in the Virginia State Colony, where many of them were forcibly sterilized. Some of the children were committed just days after Rothstein photographed them. The photographs were printed free of charge in newspapers across the country to convince the public that the mountain people were ignorant, promiscuous, feebleminded, etc., and they would be better off if they were relocated.
That documented violence created an emotional problem she had to solve as a novelist. A community the reader never comes to love cannot be genuinely mourned. She describes the structural goal she set for herself before the dispossession scenes could work.
I wanted to convey that it was a beautiful place and the people that lived there loved it and Lena fell in love with it, so that people would really feel the heartache when it was taken from them. [paraphrased from audio]
The title was chosen by her editor from a list she supplied, and the phrase she landed on does more than name the book. When Deborah Kalb asked what the title meant to her, Wiseman spelled out two distinct systems of deception that run in parallel through the novel.
My editor chose the title from a list I gave him. To me, The Lies They Told signifies the lies the U.S. government told the American people about immigrants as well as their fellow citizens. It also signifies the lies asylums and institutions told patients about appendectomies and other benign surgeries when in fact they were performing sterilizations.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Q&A with Ellen Marie Wiseman”The personal thread
Her mother’s bet on a better lifeWiseman is a first-generation German American. Her mother left Germany alone at twenty to marry a US soldier she had met near her village, and Wiseman has spent most of her life measuring the courage that decision required. The Jane Healey interview gave her a place to connect that biographical fact directly to the novel’s central character, Lena, a German immigrant who arrives in America hoping for exactly what the title says she will be denied.
She left Germany at 20 years old all by herself. She had met a US soldier and he wrote to her and said, ‘Come over and marry me,’ and she did. That bravery and that courage to just leave everything behind and take a chance that you’re going to have a better life is so profound to me. The fact that Lena, the main character in The Lies They Told, that’s all she wants — she just wants a better life for her family and her daughter. And the fact that it doesn’t turn out that way for a while is profound. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Thirty-one states and countingWiseman began researching the book roughly three years before it published in 2025. She could not have predicted the political climate it would meet, but she had already learned enough about current law to know the history she was writing about had never fully ended.
When I began researching this topic over three years ago, I never imagined how alarmingly relevant it would be in 2025. However, even before we saw migrants and citizens alike being detained and sent away, laws in 31 states — and Washington, D.C. — still permitted forced sterilization of immigrants, people with disabilities, and the incarcerated.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Q&A with Ellen Marie Wiseman”Documenting that history was one aim. The other was to make the people inside it legible to readers who have the luxury of distance. She describes what she hopes a reader carries out of the book, and the list is deliberately without hierarchy.
I hope it allows readers to step into the shoes of those who have lived through fear and injustice — to see their humanity, to recognize their pain, and to remember that all people, regardless of race, nationality, religion, education levels, physical or mental ability, deserve empathy, kindness, dignity, safety, and the chance to live free.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Q&A with Ellen Marie Wiseman”