The Lies We Tell for America: A Memoir

Named A Most Anticipated Book for Fall by Publishers Weekly and Chicago Review of Books!

"The Lies We Tell for America is beautifully particular and unexpectedly relentless in its haunting goodness. Geeez! Ber Anena manages to write New York, romance, and graduate school as inventive as I have seen all three of them written this decade." --Kiese Laymon, award-winning author of Heavy

A brilliant, piercing, and funny exploration following one woman's journey in navigating the fraught higher education system during the COVID-19 pandemic as an international student.

In 2019, Ugandan writer Ber Anena opened her email and was overjoyed to find that she'd been accepted into Columbia University's prestigious MFA in Writing. Then, reality struck: It would cost approximately $150,000 in tuition and fees alone for the two-year degree.

Anena scrambles to secure funding, leaving the security of her stable income, apartment, and family in Uganda for great uncertainty in the United States. The idea of studying in New York quickly morphs into an ordeal. From maneuvering icy roommates to grappling with food insecurity and calling out racism in her writing workshops, Anena begins to rewrite the narrative of the American Dream she had once accepted.

Incandescent and uncompromising, funny and humane, The Lies We Tell for America charts the lengths students from "shithole" countries go to seek an education in the West. These pages lay bare Anena's own cultural assumptions, while shining light on a particular kind of migrant experience. After everything--was coming to America worth it?

Ber Anena is a writer from Gulu, Uganda, and the author of A Nation in Labour, a poetry collection that won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa in 2018. She graduated from the MFA Writing program at Columbia University in 2021 and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she has been awarded the Vreeland Prize for Fiction and the Susan Atefat Peckham Prize for poetry. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Transition Magazine, Wasafiri, Prairie Schooner, The Atlantic, adda, Off Assignment, Black Warrior Review, New Daughters of Africa, and others. Her prose has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.