Reality Matters

The first winner of Survivor spent fifty-one months in federal prison for asking the IRS a question.

That is where this book begins. It does not end there.

Reality Matters is Richard Hatch's reckoning with the single most important question available to a human being: what is actually true? — and with the institutions, systems, and comfortable stories that have spent centuries making that question as difficult as possible to ask honestly.

Drawing on six decades of paying close attention — to a Catholic childhood in Rhode Island, to the death of his thirteen-year-old brother on a sidewalk, to winning Survivor in front of fifty million people, to strip searches and leg irons and a concrete cell with an eight-inch window, to a twenty-five-year legal battle that is still unfolding, to direct personal encounters with Donald Trump — Hatch builds a sustained, unsettling, and ultimately generous argument about why most of us are living at the surface of our own lives, and what it would cost and give to go deeper.

This is not a Survivor memoir. It is not a prison memoir. It is not a political polemic, though it does not flinch from politics.

It is a book about the gap between what we are shown and what is actually so — in religion, in the legal system, in the algorithm, in the supplement commercial, in the orange face of the President — and about the specific, irreplaceable satisfaction available to anyone willing to close that gap in their own life.

Reality Matters will make you uncomfortable. It will make you laugh. It will make you look at things you have been carefully not looking at.

That is exactly what it is trying to do.