I Labeled My Own Book Before Anybody Else Could

There is a paragraph at the bottom of my book page that almost everybody scrolls straight past. It is the least exciting thing on the page.

It is also the reason I sleep fine.

It says that Fighting Shadows is a first-person memoir and a documented account. It says some of what is in it rests on my own recollection. It says other parts draw on records, filings, transcripts and grievances, and that those get referenced where they exist. It is printed right there on the page, under the pre-order buttons.

I put that there on purpose. Before anybody asked me to. Before a lawyer, before an editor, before a critic.

The book is my account of January 6 and the years in federal custody that followed. You can read what it covers on the page itself. That is not what this post is about.

This post is about the labels.

Memory does not come in one grade

Here is the thing nobody warns you about when you sit down to write your own life out.

Memory is not a single substance. It arrives in at least two grades, and from the inside they feel exactly the same.

There is the part I can hand you paper for. A filing has a date stamped on it. A transcript says who spoke and when. A grievance I wrote at the time exists whether or not I remember writing it. That material does not care how I felt on the day I pulled it out of the box.

Then there is the other part. What a hallway smelled like. What somebody's voice did right before they said the thing. What I was thinking at two in the morning. What order events happened in on a day when I was in no condition to be keeping time.

That part is real. I lived it. Nobody can tell me I did not.

But it is mine and it is soft. And if I hand it to you carrying the same weight as a transcript, I have done something dishonest even if every word of it happens to be true.

So the page says which is which. And the book says which is which as it goes, line by line.

People think this weakens it. It is the opposite.

I learned that the expensive way.

If you write the whole thing at maximum volume, every sentence carrying identical weight, then all anybody has to do is find one soft spot. One shaky detail and the entire book turns into a question mark. A reader is then entitled to wonder what else you inflated, and they will, and they should.

You handed them the crowbar yourself.

But when it is labeled up front, that cannot happen. If I tell you a passage is my recollection, and my recollection turns out to be off by a month, nothing collapses. I already told you what it was. The documented parts are still documented. The record is still the record.

The reader knows where the seams are because I drew the seams.

It is the same system I run on everything here

When I publish a case document on this site, it is marked as a fact.

When I publish what I believe that document means, it is marked as my statement.

When somebody sends me something I cannot verify yet, it gets marked as needing authentication, and it sits there wearing that label until it is either confirmed or it is not.

I did not invent that. Anybody who has ever had to prove something has some version of it. I just decided to run mine out in the open where you can watch me do it, including on the days it makes my own case look smaller than I would like it to look.

Which is also why the book does not stand by itself, and the page says so. The book sits on top of an archive of filings, transcripts and documents that you can go read without buying a thing from me.

If the book is the story, that archive is the footnote drawer. And the drawer is open.

If you are trying to tell your own story

And most of you have one.

You do not need a publisher and you do not need money to start. You need two piles.

Pile one is everything you can physically put your hand on. The texts. The emails. The photos with dates buried in the metadata. The bills. The letters. The report somebody else wrote about you.

Pile two is everything you remember.

Do not mix them. Not once. Not even when mixing them would make the story land harder, and it always would.

Write from both piles. Tell people plainly which pile each part came from.

That is the whole method. It costs nothing and it will make your account harder to knock down than most of what gets published by people with a great deal more money than you have.

I am not asking anybody to take my word for the hard parts. I never have.

I am asking you to notice that I told you, in writing, on the sales page, before you spent a dollar, exactly which parts you would be taking my word for.

That is not a disclaimer.

That is the argument.