P reface

W
e’re playing a game, you and I, reader and author.
An aging black academic economist and conservative
social critic of some prominence sits down to write his
memoir. He is relatively well known, but not a household name. He is
occasionally recognized by strangers on the street, but not every day. If
the reader does know of him, that reader may know that he has, more
than once, publicly reversed his positions on a number of important
issues of the day. The reader may know that he has endured more than
one public scandal. The reader may know that he is accorded respect
in some circles and scorn in others. Perhaps the reader does not know
anything about him at all.
Whatever the case, the reader, being skeptical at the outset, will try
to discern exactly why this aging black academic economist and con-
servative social critic is writing a memoir in the first place. That is,
the skeptical reader will ask just what story this guy is selling, what
image of himself he is trying to get across. What details does the author
finesse to make himself look better than he might otherwise look? What
embarrassing incidents is he passing over in silence lest they make him
look foolish? What impression is he trying to make? The reader will
attempt to read between the lines, to locate the fatally flawed, flesh-­

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 v i i i   P r e f a c e

and-­blood human lying beneath the narrative construct that the author
has assembled for the reader’s enjoyment and, perhaps, for the author’s
own self-­aggrandizement.
Call this game “the problem of self-­regard.”
Your role in the game is to search me out. Not the narrative-­construct
me, the real me.
My role in the game is to get you to call off the search, to convince
you that the narrative construct and the man are one and the same. But
I can’t just ask you to surrender your critical faculties and believe what-
ever I say. That would be a red flag, a clear indication that I’m trying to
pull the wool over your eyes. So I need to find a way to convince you
to believe what I tell you about myself, even though you know it’s in
my interest to portray myself in the best light possible, no matter how
improbably rosy that light may be.
My strategy is as follows. I know you are going to be on the look-
out for anything that discredits my story about myself: a contradiction,
a slip of the pen, an inadvertently revealing detail about my behavior.
Since I know that you won’t be satisfied until you find this discrediting
information, I will dispense it for you freely, openly and undisguised.
My bet is that this strategy of self-­d iscrediting disclosure will accomplish
two things:
First, it will appease your impulse to find cracks in the edifice of my
self-­presentation, to search out my contradictions and too-­convenient
narrative contrivances.
Second, I hope to exploit a paradox that these self-­d iscrediting disclo-
sures will initiate. The more self-­d iscrediting information I deploy, the
more credible I will become. I will convince you that I am not lying,
because no sane person would invent the discrediting things I’m going
to tell you about myself. As you take in more and more such discred-
iting information, I will accrue a kind of credibility capital that I can
spend on incidents that cast me in a more conventionally positive light,

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 P r e f a c e    i x

because I am reasonably sure that you will then consider me to be a

reliable narrator.
A possible objection from you, the skeptical reader: I say that no sane
person would invent this discrediting information about himself, and yet
I’ve laid out a rationale for doing just that. If I’m most concerned that
you buy into my self-­presentation, and if I know that you won’t be able
to do that unless I disclose discrediting information, then don’t I have
a strategic incentive to invent discrediting information if I find myself
in need of it?
My rebuttal is simple, if distasteful: I am going to tell you things about
myself that no one would want anybody to think was true of them.
And yet, they are true.
I am going to tell you that I have lied, because I need you to believe
me. I am going to tell you that I have deceived those closest to me,
because I need you to trust me. I am going to tell you that I have aban-
doned people who needed me, because I need you to stick with me.
I must tell it all in this memoir, because if I don’t tell it all, nothing I
say will be heard.
The skeptical reader will have observed that this game has
already begun.

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