By the time I met with Bertha, I knew I wasn’t researching X’s life in order to simply dispel the falsehoods in Theodore Smith’s book, but I’d yet to fully accept I was compiling research for my own book, something I would have never elected to write if I had known, at the start, what I was actually getting into. Bertha’s question—was my book about how well X could pretend—it made me realize what I was doing, what my life had come to, and this realization brought with it a new, encumbering grief.
