Charged encounters with strangers. Such is the grist for Jason Schwartzman’s mill in his début collection of essays and vignettes, No One You Know: Strangers and the Stories We Tell. Schwartzman is a Washington University graduate. He began the book in 2015, when he moved from St. Louis to New York. Facing isolation and depression in a new city, he started to let strangers in, allowing each interaction to organically play out and escalate.
One chapter, “The Shape of a Story,” is about a bear that attacks its own trainer on a film set in New York. The author, then working in a minor temp role, has never seen the bear nor the set where the attack happened. He’s a storyteller on the periphery who wants to know the truth, and sees himself as a detective, adventurer, and philosopher. To most people on set, however, he’s a temp.
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No One You Know is about that difference in narratives: the gaps in who we are, who we think we are, and who others think we are. In one story, a man spins lie after lie about who he is and what he does, but it’s that very fiction that connects him to the author. “There was a kind of truth there: the truth of his fantasies and who he wanted to be,” Schwartzman says of the exchange, “and he was that to me in that moment.” Among the fiction of self-image, the parts that are left out, and the narrator’s personal bias, truth in No One You Know is as unknowable as it is omnipresent.
