The Factory of Facts

The acclaimed author of Low Life reinvents the memoir in a cunning, lyrical book that is at once a personal history and a meditation on the construction of identity. Born in Belgium but raised in New Jersey, Luc Sante transformed himself from a pious, timid Belgian boy into a loutish American adolescent, who eschewed French while fantasizing about the pop star Françoise Hardy. To show how this transformation came about—and why it remained incomplete—The Factory of Facts  combines family anecdote and ancestral legend; detailed forays into Belgian history, language, and religion; and deft synopses of the American character.


“Sante has a historian's fiendish taste for information . . . a journalist's wit, resourcefulness and love of idiosyncracy.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Sante's subversion of the usual psychotherapeutics of memoir-writing is refreshing, and his reconstruction of the vanished worlds of the past are elegantly fashioned.” —Publishers Weekly