SmokeLong Quarterly

Review by Alissa Hattman

Halfway through Gloria Frym’s prose collection Lies & More Lies [BLAZEVox 2025], I started to jot down every type of lie I saw on the page. Quickly, the list grew long. Each piece in Frym’s collection reveals a new facet to lying. The accumulation of lies takes on a dizzying kaleidoscopic effect, sharply relevant to the condition of living in the Unites States today.

Frym’s flash collection — which consists of wry musings, meditations, short stories, poems, satirical indictments, clever borrowed forms, and disobedient free-associative leaps — offers a taxonomy of lies, seen from a variety of vantage points. Lies & More Lies not only examines different species of lie, but also suggests something more dangerous at work in the atmosphere.

In “War is Always a Lie,” Frym distills our ongoing state of emergency:

I’ll talk about what happens in war: fire, famine, orphans, bones, then forced apologies, evangelisms and vulgarities where too much has been waiting to happen. There’s plenty of that spilling into the air we breathe.

Where “War is Always a Lie” delivers an impassioned account of the big lies, “Proper Working Order” is a story about an everyday lie, where an old woman talks to a home improvement representative on the phone. As they talk, the rep lies to her about having serviced her heating system in the past. When the old woman confronts him, he simply responds “everyone lies.” The interplay between these two pieces sets the stage for the rest of the collection. While lies vary in definition and scale, lying is insidious because it is the norm.

As the lie multiplies, so does its power to corrupt. Frym shows that there are so many types of lies, we’ve had to invent new vocabulary: the two-faced, gaslighting untruths that spew from a president’s mouth, for example. Americans, in particular, have reached an all-time low for the category of lies within lies within lies. We’ve mastered the turducken lie, which might be funny if it weren’t so hateful and grotesque. Several pieces in Lies & More Lies refer to the 2016-2020 presidency, so it’s fitting that Frym’s collection would arrive in 2025, during the second charade. A thread of gallows humor frays throughout the book: “Sorry, I can’t smell lies anymore, I’m protected by smoke from fires chortling right to my door.” Certain pieces, such as “Do No Harm,” “Bearable,” and “The Trickle-Down Effect,” sting even more, given our current situation.

In “Hear! Hear!,” for example, the speaker talks about lying as a type of contagion:

One rotten orange and the powdery fungus spreads. The appearance of corruption soon corrupts. And then the whole crowd is sour, soon the walls, soon they’re screaming for a king instead of a vote.

Lies & More Lies urges us to consider the stakes when we subordinate our thinking to the narrative of a world leader, some new technology, or a dogmatic ideology. Frym’s writing evokes the strange, scrambled, alienating feeling of being absorbed by a nation’s corrupt corpus of lies. Her satirical use of borrowed forms — expressing a truth through the template of a dating app or a government document — is a clever subversion of how the lie often relies on a certain template. If a liar knows his audience well enough, for example, he knows how to game their expectations. In her 1972 lecture “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” Hannah Arendt talks about why lies are more appealing than reality. Arendt says, “the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption . . . whereas, reality has a disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected for which we are not prepared.” It is dangerous, Arendt says, when a liar believes his own lies and is so sure of the lie that he “instill[s] into the people a new kind of thinking.” Arendt was talking about Nazi Germany, but her lecture goes on to suggest that it wasn’t the lying that was the most dangerous aspect — it was the feeling of alienation that creates the condition for the lie to spread. When people feel alone, Arendt says, they lose touch with reality and often look to others for truth.

Though Arendt is not referenced in Lies & More Lies, the concept of the appeal of the liar, the messiness of reality, the liar convinced of the lie, and the feeling of alienation within a country built on lies is ever-present throughout the book. Frym writes about “the disagreeable truth” and having to invent “a smooth fiction” in order to get by in America: “I personally began to lie like a thief whose very freedom depended on the narrative.” With the help of Walt Whitman and the Black Lives Matter movement, she ends her collection with some hard truths: “We can no longer gradually head for the territories in search of ‘freedom.’ You air that serves me with breath to speak, we can’t breathe.”

Lies & More Lies can be admired for its sardonic tone and artful reproach of neoliberalism and extractive economies. If some of the longer pieces in the middle tend to sag, Frym is forgiven since most other pieces have heat and build in a way that is fresh and exciting. Hybrid flash collections like Frym’s are antidotes to the liar formula. They are many things, but you can trust that they are not Kool-Aid. They are a risky, hard-to-define category, disconcerting and unfamiliar, crafted through their consideration of reader participation. I, for one, felt free to move around. To pause, to feel, to be angry, to laugh, to disagree, and, yes, to think for myself.

You can order Lies & More Lies from BLAZEVox now.

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Alissa Hattman is author of the novel Sift (The 3rd Thing, 2023) and the chapbook POST (zines + things, 2021). In addition to SmokeLong Quarterly, her book reviews can be found in The Rumpus, Rain Taxi, Big Other, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in the Pacific Northwest. More at www.alissahattman.com.