What does it mean to truly know someone — or ourselves — after a lifetime spent side by side? In her new memoir A Version of the Truth (Sunbury Press, October 7), author and psychotherapist Marsh Rose explores that question through the lens of a forty-year relationship built on quiet companionship, shared rituals, and the subtle complexities of love.
Set against the serene backdrop of Northern California’s wine country, Rose’s story unfolds in small, poignant moments — mending fences, feeding birds, and navigating the spaces between closeness and solitude. But when a sudden crisis disrupts her bond with Jack, the man who has been both partner and mystery, Marsh is left to untangle what we ever really know about the people we love — and about ourselves.
With tender honesty and introspection, A Version of the Truth invites readers to confront the unknowns that shape our relationships and to find peace in the ambiguity that so often defines love, grief, and growing older.
Chapter One
“You live in this miserable heap all by yourself.”
—A Strange Man
hat would you do if you needed the answer to an
usnsolvable mystery? Would you drive yourself mad,
searching? Would you cling to denial while it paced the
edges of your awareness? Or would you get a version you
could live with, and live with it? Jack and I were in an intimate rela-
tionship for almost forty years. While we never married or shared
a home, we spent two nights a week together and talked on the
phone almost every day. He saw me through houses, cars, careers,
pets, crises, and celebrations. And then, he vanished. When I found
him ten days later, he’d had a hemorrhagic stroke. He was incapaci-
tated. He could no longer speak. His memory was lost. And he was
living with another woman who called him by a different name.
We met in 1985. I was 35 and he was 40. He turned up at the
door of my decrepit rental in the rural Northern California town
where I had just moved from Philadelphia. I’d had a bad night.
Although I was an urban transplant, I was no stranger to wild
animals. Feral cats wandering the streets at night in Philly would
awaken me with their shrieks, and we had the occasional rat in our
trash, and mouse in the pantry. Once, a bat got into the attic and
my father caught it in a pillowcase while Mom and I cowered in a
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closet. Those creatures were tame compared to the menagerie that
circled my country bungalow when the sun went down. I heard
scrabbling and squalling from the underbrush, saw eyeshine in the
hedges. In the morning I counted tracks in the mud, all sizes and
shapes of tracks, any number of toes, something that slithered and
something with opposable thumbs that I hoped to hell was a rac-
coon. A monkey would have sent me over the edge. I was in a
state of anxiety-fueled insomnia. Animals made me nervous. You
can’t tell what they’re thinking. Fear of animals is an actual thing.
Zoophobia. I learned about it in graduate school when I was work-
ing on my degree in clinical psychology. “An intense, irrational,
and uncontrollable fear of animals.” So, to scare them away, that
night I had turned on every light in the house, inside and out,
including a spotlight over the back porch.
Someone rang my doorbell the next morning. There was no
peephole for me to see who had come calling, so against my urban
instincts, I opened the door. For one brilliant moment, I thought
the man standing on my porch was my high school crush, Jimmy
Lee Bevins. That shaggy auburn hair, those wide blue eyes, the tat-
tered blue jeans, the cowboy boots. I was in love with Jimmy Lee,
and he with . . . well, officially with Joanne Malloy but probably
with any of the hardened girls who chewed gum with their mouths
open and smoked behind the bleachers. Jimmy Lee never knew
I existed: the small, skinny sophomore with frizzy hair and thick
glasses. And now, here was his adult doppelganger casting a long
shadow over my front porch.
“I seen your lights on all night,” the man said. “What’s the
matter?”
The only other residence on this isolated cul-de-sac was a
ragged farmhouse. I noted it warily each time I passed. It looked
like news images of Barker Ranch where Charles Manson gathered
his followers: a one-story frame house, a barn with a collapsing
roof, a collection of vehicles, and donkeys or horses or some other
large animal in a dusty pasture.
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I peered past the man and saw no car in my driveway. Had
he too been lurking in the bushes last night? My voice in my ears
sounded an octave higher than normal. “Who are you and how did
you know my lights were on?”
“Oh, sorry. Name’s Jack.” He held out his right hand. I reflex-
ively shook it, noting the warmth and calluses that felt like sand-
paper. “I live up there.” He pointed toward the farmhouse. Having
shaken hands, the moment for me to slam the door had passed. “I
was worried. Usually, the only reason for lights to be on all night
is someone is up sick. And you live in this miserable heap all by
yourself.”
What to do? On one hand, he knew I lived alone, and he could
be a cult leader. On the other hand, I was in the nostalgic haze of
Jimmie Lee. That’s how it began.
To learn more about Marsh Rose and her work, visit marshroseauthor.com. There, you can explore her previous novels, essays, and award-winning short stories, as well as updates on her writing and upcoming projects. A Version of the Truth is available now from Sunbury Press and wherever books are sold.