What is the author's perspective in the memoir, What You Have Heard Is True?

The author’s perspective is generally perceptive and focused, though the specific tense that Forché uses is variable. Sometimes, the author uses the literary present tense in order to dramatize events and to immerse the reader in the action being described. For example, the first pages of the book, in which Forché discovers a human head, opens in the literary present.

Forché also often uses the future tense, describing events that from the present moment have already happened but that, from the past, are events that are yet to happen in the future. For example, even in the same opening pages, Forché reflects that, “On this day, I will learn that the human head weighs about two and a half kilos” (4). Though the reader knows that this is a reflection on the past, it is framed as a future realization. While there may be many reasons why Forché writes in this way, one possibility is that she is trying to replicate the sense of change and discovery that permeated her life at this time. Through this perspective, Forché invites the reader to step into her shoes and to imagine her life and mental state as she was at the time, when her life was yet to happen.

However, Forché also mixes tenses. For example, she switches in the very next section to the present perfect: “Over the years, I have asked myself what would have happened if I hadn’t answered the door that morning” (5). This tense immediately catapults the reader back into the present moment, when Forché is an older woman looking back on her life. The vacillations between tenses remind the reader that this narrative is one of memory being constructed from the present moment.