The Truth According to Us

At the beginning of the novel, Jottie is utterly subjugated to her brother, Felix, and devoted to Felix’s daughters, Willa and Bird. Jottie believes that she owes her gratitude to Felix for having stood by her after the death of her lover, Vause, under mysterious and potentially criminal circumstances. As a result, Jottie finds herself trapped in the small town that she longed to escape, compulsively seeking stability. She negates her own feelings and desires, becoming a “saint” in the eyes of the community. However, Jottie maintains a rebellious streak, rigorously critiquing overly subservient stories and encouraging both Layla and her nieces to look beyond established, authoritative patriarchal “truths.”

Jottie’s initial rebellion against Felix comes from a desire to have the girls fit in socially. She is worried by Willa’s declaration that she feels obliged to “lie” about their family and longs to regain the family’s previous social prestige by marrying Sol McKubin. However, Jottie soon realizes that by substituting Sol for Felix, she is only replacing one form of patriarchal authority with another and is coming no closer to her own truth. She ultimately places her motherhood of Willa and Bird and her sisterhood to Layla before all other ties and sets out to discover her own identity, her own truth, and her own voice as a writer.

Layla is initially viewed with envious suspicion by the Romeyn sisters and with adulation by Willa because of her outsider status—she comes from a big city and a higher social class. However, in her rebellion against patriarchal social constraints and her search for an authentic narrative voice, Layla proves to have a great deal in common with both Jottie and Willa.

Layla’s historical research, the purpose that brings her to Macedonia, West Virginia, serves as a vehicle for the novel’s broader exploration of how individuals and societies should narrate, understand, and relate to their past. Initially, Layla sees writing purely as an act of rebellion and a way of overturning patriarchal narratives. However, the mentorship of Miss Betts, the town librarian, and Layla’s own experiences gradually teach her to adopt a more nuanced and less judgmental stance.

As Layla rebels against her politically powerful father, she initially seeks to replace his influence with that of an alternative male authority figure—first her previous lover, Charles, and then Felix. When she has been betrayed and abused by both of these men, she ultimately finds relief and companionship in her sisterhood with Jottie, Mae, and Minerva.

Felix shares Jottie and Willa’s tendency to rebel against patriarchal order and the status quo. As a teenager, he was a trickster, forever playing pranks and exploring secret passageways. As an adult, he remains resolutely on the fringes of society and is an outlaw who willfully scorns social conventions. However, the absolutist and aggressive terms of Felix’s individualistic stance mean that he lacks empathy and tyrannizes those around him.

Felix uses his charm to manipulate characters such as Tare Russell and Layla, only to discard them as soon as he gets what he wants. He keeps Jottie in a kind of psychological prison, allowing her to believe that everything she thought she knew about her first true love was a lie, in order to save himself from solitude.

When Felix finally tells the truth of the events that led up to Vause’s death, it emerges that his apparent self-love is a reaction to an overwhelming and insurmountable sense of guilt and self-hatred. Haunted by his best friend’s death, Felix sees himself as irredeemable and acts out the part of the monster that he believes himself to be and that he saw reflected in his friend’s eyes the last time he saw him alive.

Sol spent his youth in the shadow of the more charismatic Vause and Felix, frustrated in his unrequited love for Jottie. As an adult, he gradually turns the tables on Felix. As his childhood bully is cast out of polite society and cuts an increasingly desperate figure, Sol acquires the role that might once have been Felix’s legacy: president of American Everlasting Hosiery Company.

Jottie’s attraction to Sol wanes when she finds that his version of events is, in some ways, not much “truer” than Felix’s. Like Felix, Sol seeks to control the narrative of Vause’s death to further his own ends and to distort Jottie’s vision of the past. This is not to say that Sol is the jealous manipulator that Felix makes him out to be. Although he weds someone else shortly after Jottie abandons him, the marriage is short-lived, and he is soon back at the Romeyn house seeking out her company. Jottie ultimately recognizes and forgives Sol’s imperfections.