The Truth About the Lies I Told Myself. A Poetry Memoir - Staniella Othello

What happens when the love story you fought for becomes the lie that breaks you?

In The Truth About the Lies I Told Myself, Staniella Othello braids poems, letters, journal entries, and razor-sharp prose into a record of devotion turning feral: red flags recast as romance, silence renamed loyalty, and endurance mistaken for love. What begins as tenderness becomes evidence-the small bargains, the swallowed words, the body's alarms explained away.

When the story finally splits, she follows the fracture back through earlier conditioning-abandonment, predatory attention, the hunger to be chosen-and chooses the holy terror of leaving. In the aftermath, grief is not a lesson but a landscape, and truth arrives with a cost.

This book is heartbreak with teeth. Raw, reflective, and deeply human, The Truth About the Lies I Told Myself is for anyone who has ever loved someone more than they loved themselves and is ready to come home.