Have you heard about or seen Nathan Fielder’s latest work, You Can See Everything, a three-hour documentary(?) where Fielder and director Lance Oppenheim spend time with Theranos founder/convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes (and her husband and kids) in the month leading up to her going to jail? No spoilers if you haven’t, but it’s safe to say that it’s one of the most confounding and flabbergasting films of the year.

It will make you gasp and ask, more than once, “WTF is so-and-so’s deal?” You might also wonder, “What is reality, even? And can we ever truly understand another person?” It will also make you so uncomfortable that your skin will crawl off your body.

Don’t believe me? Watch this trailer and try not to squirm:

Are you okay? I’m here for you.

You Can See Everything got me thinking about A LOT of things, including books with unreliable narrators and/or main characters who are truly, sometimes unexpectedly, horrible. (Or are they?) There are some obvious ones — Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn comes immediately to mind — but I put together a list of other books if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole of wondering what makes a person and/or reality.

Note: I have affiliate links to purchase each of these books via my online bookstore. The price for you doesn’t change, but I may get a very small portion of the proceeds.

This is a must have on the list. Bad Blood is an expansion of journalist John Carreyrou’s reporting on Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. His work was integral for exposing the fraud for what it is, and if you’re trying to still understand who Elizabeth Holmes is… reading this book may help. (Or not, since perhaps it’s impossible to truly understand or know someone, even if you can see everything.) (See what I did there?)

Enric Marco is Elizabeth Holmes’s grifter godfather. This 2014 book, translated into English in 2018 (and longlisted for the Booker Prize that year), chronicles how Marco wasn’t the Holocaust survivor and war veteran he claimed to be, but a compulsive liar who rose to prominence in Spain, only to fall in 2005 when he was exposed as a fraud.

I purposefully didn’t link to this book because I don’t think you should read it! I’m including it, however, because Olivia Nuzzi — the journalist who had an affair with RFK Jr. while she was covering his U.S. presidential run — was so disgraced as a journalist that Vanity Fair gave her the high-profile job of West Coast Editor. That VF gig, however, went away after this “memoir” came out; the book was almost universally panned for being self-centered drivel that doesn’t seem to hew to any reality the rest of us live in. I repeat: don’t buy or read this book! Lit Hub has a summary of the best lines from the book’s many scathing reviews. Read that instead.

Trust, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is broken up into four parts, each touching on the lives of a wealthy late 19th-century NYC finance guy and his wife. Each part is written text — a novel, an autobiography, a diary, and a memoir — that touches on the same people and events but hold different information and perspectives, leaving it to the reader to decide what is, in fact, real. (Or what “real” even means.)

Humbert Humbert is a monster! He’s a murderer (yes, he killed his wife) and a sexual predator. He’s also trying to seduce you, the reader, into thinking he’s something else. But he’s not! The setup is familiar, though his crimes are as terrible as they come.

Every time you might start feeling a smidge of sympathy for Juniper Hayward, a basic white girl who steals her more-successful, recently dead friend’s work about Chinese laborers during World War I, you’re reminded that she is, in fact, a terrible person lying to everyone around her, including herself.

McCarthy’s book centers on a man who has lost his memory after a terrible, unnamed accident. He received a big payout because of it, and spends much of the novel trying to recreate “real” moments in a search for meaning. It starts out benign, and then gets disturbingly violent, with the main character effectively using his money to shape reality as he sees fit.