Letter from the Publisher: Truth Demands
Categories: New Release Letter from the Publisher
Truth Demands is not just a book. It is an invitation to consider what the truth demands of us: to look unflinchingly at the harm that we have inflicted on the planet and each other and to refuse to capitulate to the silence, hopelessness, and inertia that allow so much destruction to continue in our names.
It’s not often that I’ve known a NAB author for 14 years.
But so it is with Abby Reyes, whom I first met in 2011 when I was living in North Carolina and working as the managing editor of The Sun magazine. The Sun received around 1,000 submissions per month, and I only read a fraction of those—we employed several “first readers” to comb through the stacks and pass the strongest pieces up the chain for others to review.
During this particular week, we were getting ready to add another reader to our team, and I was preparing a test for the candidates. I needed a diverse sample of twenty manuscripts for a “test packet,” and so I combed through the stacks of recent submissions looking for an equal mix of essays, short stories, and poems.
Amid the packet I created was an intriguing essay by Abby Reyes called “Aflame” that explored family legacies in the context of the author becoming a new mother. It was certainly an essay that I would want to see at a subsequent review, and so I had included it with the expectation that the applicants would mark it as one deserving the next set of eyes.
After work, I returned home—my wife Anna was out of town, but Dell, a close friend of ours from California, was staying with us for a few weeks as she navigated a period of transition. Over dinner, Dell confided that she felt depressed. “I just want to forget my life for a few hours; can we watch a movie or something together?”
“Absolutely,” I replied. “I’d really like to rewatch a documentary that I think you’d like.”
“Great, what is it?”
“It’s called Fierce Grace,” I responded. “It’s a film about the spiritual teacher Ram Dass and how his life changed after suffering a stroke.”
“TIM!!! I said I wanted to watch something that would take me away from it all; why would I want to sit through a movie about a man having a stroke! C’mon!”
“I promise that you will feel uplifted by this movie,” I reassured Dell. “I know it doesn’t seem likely, but trust me.”
And so Dell and I watched Fierce Grace. And it did indeed raise my friend’s spirits, especially the part of the film where a bereft woman visits Ram Dass to get his counsel after a staggering loss in her life. The scenes between them were so touching—and the woman so authentic—that Dell insisted we wait for the credits to learn her name.
“Ah, Abby Reyes is her name,” Dell said as the credit rolled by.
“Abby Reyes, Abby Reyes,” I mused out loud. “Wait a minute, I know that name. I think I literally just read an essay by her today at work!”
Sure enough, when I got to the office the next morning, I looked at the stack of manuscripts that I had assembled and saw Abby’s essay near the top. What happenstance: our hero from last night’s film was right there in the pages of my hand!
I read the essay again, this time with the benefit of knowing a bit more about the author. Moved by it, I removed it from the test packet to hand directly to the next reader in line, who in this case was The Sun’s founder and publisher, Sy Safransky.
Sy liked the essay but thought that it wasn’t quite ready to publish. I wrote Abby and offered to sit with her in North Carolina the next time she visited her parents in Durham to help prepare for revision. We did that sitting—and then Abby, her children, and I jumped in the river near our home and swam into its swirls. Early-childhood parenting ended up taking over for Abby, and she did not revisit the piece.
Flash forward to 2018. I’m now working as the publisher at North Atlantic Books. I receive an email from Abby with the subject line “And then,” in which she writes, “I wrote a manuscript. And I’d love your guidance about what comes next. . . .I could keep working on the manuscript for a lifetime (there is much to do). But before I dedicate myself again and more to that, I want to understand how to be strategic with the focus and sequencing of the next round of effort.”
I was intrigued. Given the strength of Abby’s original essay, I felt confident that a book-length manuscript would mesmerize, especially knowing what Abby was writing about: her healing journey after her partner Terence Unity Freitas was murdered. He was killed along with two other land-rights advocates as they stood in solidarity with the U’wa, one of Colombia’s Indigenous peoples, a community then fighting a U.S. oil company.
The manuscript was searing and revelatory. Initially entitled Beholden, the rough draft was so potent that I wrote to Abby the moment I finished reading it: “Such good writing. And the ending had my heart both broken and open.”
Over the next few years, Abby continued to sharpen the manuscript. What was especially challenging in her case is that real-life events transpired that fundamentally changed the book’s arc and story as she was writing it. Most significantly, in 2019 Colombia invited Abby to take part in its historic transitional-justice process, formed to bring light to the atrocities of that nation’s decades-long internal armed conflict. They wanted to know if Abby had any “truth demands” for them about Terence’s murder—lingering questions about what had happened to him that the proceedings could endeavor to answer. Questions like: Why was he taken? Who pulled the trigger? Who was really behind the killings?
This development was so significant that Abby had to add and rewrite significant portions of the book; she changed the title to “Truth Demands” and navigated new layers of permissions, legalities, and ethical considerations. I am so grateful that Abby—amid all these unfolding events, her full-time job, and the raising of two young children—took the time she needed to get things right.
And so now, 14 years after we first met and seven years after she first told me about the book, I am overjoyed to announce North Atlantic Books’ publication of Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice. The New York Times has already featured the book in its Sunday book review, praising it as “a searching memoir.”
I can think of no better tribute to the book than the words of the renowned physician and activist Dr. Seema Jilani, who wrote: “Truth Demands is a gripping feat of storytelling. From the rivers of the rainforest to the halls of Washington, DC, to wrestling with her own personal loss, Reyes is forced into her own coming of age. Her memoir is a story of lost innocence, and the reclamation of that loss later in life. It is an authentic and fiercely passionate book that implores us to consider how ecological activism is full of the very same markers of colonial injustices the world increasingly wrestles with. We are lucky to read a depiction that gives those stories a name, a place, and, most importantly, a heart.”
Truth Demands is not just a book. It is an invitation to consider what the truth demands of us: to look unflinchingly at the harm that we have inflicted on the planet and each other and to refuse to capitulate to the silence, hopelessness, and inertia that allow so much destruction to continue in our names. It is an invitation to take hold of our common humanity and follow the lead of the communities, like the U’wa, who are showing us the way.
Reading Truth Demands is thus not just a tribute to Terence and the innumerable people who have lost their lives standing up for justice—it is in fact an act of defiance and solidarity and a gift to our own struggling and insurgent selves.
—Tim McKee, publisher of North Atlantic Books
Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice
Spanning three decades and three continents, Truth Demands charts Abby Reyes’ parallel journeys as she navigates the waters of loss, purpose, and impermanence while fighting for truth and accountability from big oil. A profound and haunting memoir, Truth Demands is an invitation into the current. It shows us how to hold fast even as we let go.
About the Author
Tim McKee
Tim came to NAB in 2013 and is honored to serve as publisher. Born in New York City, McKee grew up in Los Angeles and received a BA from Princeton University and an MA in journalism from the University of Missouri. He has worked in the nonprofit sector for his entire career, including serving as the long-time managing editor of The Sun magazine, the grants director for a social-justice foundation in San Francisco, and as a writer for several community-based organizations in California. He has also taught college-level writing and journalism. His book No More Strangers Now: Young Voices from a New South Africa (Dorling Kindersley) was an Honor Book for the Jane Addams Book Award and a Los Angeles Times bestseller. He is happiest when bringing necessary stories to the page.
