Publishing the essay, I realized, was breaking a cardinal rule in journalism: write the story, don’t be the story. And, for more than a decade, I had already broken another cardinal rule of journalism—lying. For the record, I never lied in any of my stories. I never fabricated a single fact or contextual detail or made up a source, lies that ended the careers of other journalists I’d heard and read about, from Janet Cooke to Stephen Glass to Jayson Blair. Still, I lied about who I am, specifically my legal status, a defining element of my life. To get jobs, I had lied to employers, from the
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