A Good Girl's Guide to Lying: Losing My Memory, Searching for Truth, & Confronting Complex Trauma

A courageous and compelling memoir about one woman's experience with dissociative PTSD, for readers of Gisèle Pelicot and Sarah Polley.

On paper, Michelle Hébert was a successful, high-functioning woman. A former social worker turned government executive, a mother of two, a wife, a published author. But there was a secret about her that nobody knew―one that her own brain was trying to keep from her. One that was destroying her from the inside out. Why couldn't she recognize herself in mirrors? Why did her mind disconnect from her body for long periods, leaving her to deal with decisions she made while she was dissociated―like finding herself walking down the aisle at a wedding she didn't remember planning? Why couldn't she shake the gnawing fear that something was very wrong with her brain, or that she'd done something terrible?

A mystery disguised as a memoir, this deeply layered story of complex trauma takes readers on one woman's search for decades of memories lost. Gaslighted by misogyny and a broken health-care system, and forced to reinvent herself over and over again, Michelle must piece together the fragments of her past to uncover what happened one August afternoon in the 1980s.

A sometimes heartbreaking, often darkly humorous, and ultimately redemptive memoir of identity, resilience, and resistance, and a compelling testament to the lengths our brains will go to protect us, A Good Girl's Guide to Lying is a powerful reminder that it's never too late to become who you really are.

Michelle Hébert's stories and essays have appeared in magazines and newspapers across North America and have aired on CBC Radio. Her writing has been longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction and degrees in journalism and social work. Michelle's first book, Enriched by Catastrophe: Social Work and Social Conflict after the Halifax Explosion, was published by Fernwood in 2007. The Toronto Star named her debut novel, Every Little Thing She Does is Magic (Vagrant, 2024), one of the 20 'Must Read' books of Summer 2024, and it was named a 49thShelf.com Fiction Book of the Year. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she teaches creative writing and supports writers using trauma-informed writing practices. You can learn more about her writing at michellehebertwrites.com.