The Office of Historical Corrections

by Danielle Evans

Somehow she’d expected the dying to be the worst part, that after it was over she could go home and tell some healthy living version of her mother about the terrible thing that had just happened to her.

although her actual background—Black and Polish and Lebanese—was alchemy it had taken the country of her birth to make happen.

who wants to be loved for the hole in their chest when there is a woman somewhere willing to lie and say she can fix it, another prepared to spend decades pretending it isn’t there?

I didn’t—and still don’t—dare compare the terms of my life to my mother’s, the stakes of my choices to hers, but I understand more now about how it feels to love the excess in people, about how knowing someone else’s love will consume you doesn’t make it any less real or any less reciprocated, about how you can leave a person behind just to save the thing they value most—yourself.

would nuzzle him, beginning to understand that just because he didn’t see something in her didn’t mean it wasn’t there, knowing there was still some freedom in the way he did not fathom yet how real and how necessary her ruthlessness would

The congresswoman envisioned a national network of fact-checkers and historians, a friendly citizen army devoted to making the truth so accessible and appealing it could not be ignored.

it. Our work was to protect the historical record, not to pick fights (guideline 1) or correct people’s readings of current news (guideline 2).

The influencer dubbed us The Office of Mansplaining, which was picked up by at least a thousand of her million followers. I was one of three women of color who were field historians with the project at the time; in the wake of the controversy, I had been sent by the director to be profiled in The Post, to show we were inclusive and nonthreatening.

but we shared an urgency about the kind of work we were doing, a belief that the truth was our last best hope, and a sense that our own mission was less neutral and more necessary than that of the white men we answered to at the office.

The very fact of Genie being Genevieve was unsettling. Just as I was accepting that I had grown into as much of a different person as I was ever going to become, Genevieve showed up proving it was still possible to entirely reinvent yourself. Perhaps in whatever years Genie was turning into Genevieve, I was supposed to have been turning into someone called Cassandra.