There is a particular landscape of loss that comes from uncovering secrets about the dead. It is a landscape defined by the loss of the beloved, and then by the compounding loss of betrayal.
This complex terrain has been charted in a number of popular narratives—we seem to be fascinated not just by tragedy, but by the posthumous realization of double lives, secret families, fabricated narratives, and unreliable narrators; perhaps we sense that we, too, are building our lives upon a series of illusions, and are at once desperate to know what lies beneath the veil and terrified to ask too many questions. In these narratives of compounded loss, there appears an instability so intense, a void so potent that madness is liable to subsume the discoverer of truth into its gaping maw.
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