When Katie met my wife Kasia, they were so alike. Katie’s full name was Katarzyna, like Kasia’s was. Like Kasia, she’d been born in Poland, and both of them had left Poland as children (Katie at eight, Kasia at thirteen). Katie also spoke Polish at home with her family, and they had both learned English to native fluency as teenagers.

“We can switch to Polish if you want?” Kasia asked her.

Katie declined. She said she had a language processing difficulty, which made switching a challenge.

Like Kasia, she had started going by Katie in school (for Katie, here in the USA; for Kasia, in Ireland—switching back to her Polish name at university). Katie had worked as a teacher like Kasia. She had memorized poetry in school like Kasia; had foraged for mushrooms in the summers like Kasia; she had family living in Lviv, where Kasia’s grandmother came from. While my wife and I switched to Polish to communicate secretly around others, Katie did the same with her sister around her nephews. Unlike many grads on the program, Katie bought a house with her own saved money, not her parents’, like Kasia. Katie treasured her Polish amber jewelry like Kasia; drunk barszcz out of the bowl like Kasia, and remembered the taste of it from her childhood, like Kasia; cut her hair short like Kasia; wrote her first year paper on the historical impact of a Polish poem on Polish nationalism like Kasia; pivoted her studies from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Hapsburg Galicia to the image of the Polish nation in the nineteenth-century press like Kasia. When Kasia found out she was pregnant, Katie missed her period, and experienced strange stomach cramps, like Kasia. There was all sorts they had in common. In Poland Kasia is such a common name.

Like all friendships built on a close affinity, it grew quickly, and soon I met Katie and befriended her too. Katie became our dog-sitter, even being willing to stay over (it had been a nightmare to find someone who would). She was our closest friend locally; we gave her the code to our front door. We often had her round for dinner, our only regular for a year and a half.

All that time, we’d never been to hers, but one day she did invite us over, for dinner and a game of Diplomacy. “Games of Diplomacy are known to ruin friendships,” I said, and we laughed.

*

There was a particularly ominous feeling that evening. It was a brief respite from the cold snap of that winter: it was only minus four celsius after weeks of minus fifteen, twenty, so for the first time in a while it was bearable stepping out of the car onto Katie’s street, trying to find which was her house. There’s that silly line in chapter two of The Great Gatsby we used to snicker at in school for its outdated reference and twee ring: “this fella’s a regular Belasco.” A creator of film sets. Katie lived on a beautiful street that belonged in a horror movie. Big houses with big garages, plenty of space between them, somewhere quiet on the edge of town. The street’s spotless footpath led to the side of a highway. Other cul-de-sacs branched off, and your eyes stretched glancing down them, and they curved at the ends in a way that hid the last houses. The clouds pressed low. A fistful of trees shivered and coughed behind one distant house, and I thought I heard a wooden gate slow-clap our arrival. I felt puny. Something horrible was off.

(Then it hit me. It was just that the road was wide enough for three cars to drive on at once. It left so much space between everything that the whole street seemed built for giants or quarterbacks or whatever mythical beast belonged to the Great Plains. It had all been no more than a bodily reaction to American excess—silly me!)

Katie welcomed us warmly: we stepped through into her spacious living room, where comfortable sofas and armchairs lined the entire wall towards the open-plan kitchen. The centre of the lounge was empty; one’s eyes focused either on the bare parquet floor, the sweet lit-up Christmas tree tucked beneath the staircase spandrel on the opposite wall, or the distant Katie making us tea over by the sink.

My wife Kasia went to the restroom. Recently Katie had had a conflict with her housemate, and I wanted the gossip—but I didn’t know whether the housemate was in. I asked Katie in Polish, so that the housemate wouldn’t hear:

“Czyli—czy twoja znajoma tu jest, na górze, czy na zewnątrz?” (So—is your friend upstairs, or outside?)

Katie replied “Taaak, taaak!” (Yes, yes!) with a thick American accent.

She’d misheard. I wondered whether I should repeat myself. But there’d been an odd look in her eyes, flaring slightly as if to signal that the housemate was right behind me.

Surely the housemate couldn’t even hear me?

Before I worked out how to respond, Katie switched back to English and abruptly changed the subject. Like I’d spoken out of turn.

No, but she had pretended to ignore the question, choosing to pointedly breeze past a sentence in which I’d embarrassed myself. It felt rather like she was performing the role of a condescending upper-crust New-England mother from a period drama. Katie often had this odd way of holding back her emotions: an austere courtesy that suddenly turned rigid, as if to endure a disagreeable opinion. Talking with her I was frequently left with a vague feeling of guilt.

But the error this time wasn’t mine, so that was irritating.

Later on, while setting up the game of Diplomacy, Katie mentioned that her housemate was out of the house, mid-conversation. This made it weird. My Polish hadn’t been that bad. And if she’d misheard, she would’ve asked me to repeat. No—she hadn’t remotely understood the question.

But Katie returned to the Diplomacy game, and we moved on. She told us about the one she’d played a few days ago as I helped set up, popping the counters out of their cardboard holders for the first time.

*

They’re called false friends when you’re learning a language. You see a word that looks like it has an easy, direct translation from one language into another: it actually means something completely different, and you’ve been misled. Polish-English is an unusual pairing that has some rather fun ones: a Pole might be more grateful to live with four brats when a brat is a brother; a Pole who puts on a dres would come out in a tracksuit. Do wish him fart: that’s “good luck.” Smak is taste, which makes it harder to smack the taste out of a Pole’s mouth if they swear in front of babcia; and even if you went looking for a pole to attempt this, you’d be directed to a field, bland and empty.

*

The following week Kasia began teaching undergraduate classes again. Friday evening she returned beaming. Two of her students were Polish, born here in America, though they had gone to some kind of Polish after-school-school for years. There they’d received the Polish grammar education that children learn in order to properly master the language. Once they saw Kasia’s name they switched to perfect Polish themselves and asked what town she was from; one even had family close to Kasia’s own.

Half an hour later Kasia stopped me in the kitchen.

“Hang on. It’s weird that Katie’s never mentioned her hometown. Wouldn’t that be the first thing you’d say?”

I agreed. It was the first thing I asked about whenever I met another Brit.

All she had ever said was “Galicia.” That was the historic region she studied for her research, sure, but this was a rather general—and outdated—regional label. It was like a Brit saying they grew up in “East Anglia,” or an American in “Alta California”—you never would.

Kasia’s students’ accents were perfect, but Katie’s hadn’t been when she’d replied to me. Kasia had heard it from the restroom. She had also found it weird at the time, and then, like me, hadn’t known how to broach it, how to admit it openly between us.

Katie probably didn’t speak Polish. Maybe she hadn’t lived or been born there either. But how was this even possible? What?!

*

Well, this had to be wrong. Katie was trustworthy. She also had the house keys and the caretaking responsibility for two other grad students currently abroad on Fulbright. She was everyone else’s closest friend too.

And saying that: Kasia had noticed that their group chat had gone quiet recently. Messages from Katie had all but dried up. That dinner had ended quite awkwardly: Katie had lost at Diplomacy so badly it had looked like she’d been lying about even knowing how to play.

Did she suspect we had suspected her? And was trying to—what—hide?

Surely there was evidence in her favor about the Polish thing. She had told both of us she’d grown up in a large farmhouse. Only now Kasia remembered her saying once she’d grown up in a communist block as well, just like Kasia. So which was it?

She’d only ever mentioned the communist block once (right after Kasia had), and then never again; whereas the farmhouse had come up a few times. Katie had always said her father was Polish (and her mother, French), and had worked as a Professor of some kind. So why would a university professor in Poland live in a farm house? This didn’t quite make sense in Poland—no one was commuting into Kraków from a farm house in “Kraków’s commuter belt.”

She did once say she had cousins near Katowice—although now Kasia thought about it, Katie had pronounced the Polish “ce” at the end (“tseh”) with an Italian pronunciation (“chay”). It was like saying “Washingtom B.C.” And her birth name, Katarzyna—if it really had been—she’d once pronounced the English phonetic way (“cat-arr-zee-na”)—a big mistake, when “rz” is the same single sound as the “je” in “je m’appelle.” For someone who grew up in Poland until the age of eight, why would she forget the alphabet? And why had she lost her accent so totally, especially if she spoke it at home? Even if she somehow did speak it, and all this was due to the language-processing difficulty—why wouldn’t she correct herself, why would she continue on with total confidence?

Kasia and I were both cupping our cheeks. Oh my God. We alternated between distant, shocked looks and frantic exclamations of ahhhh, attempts to exhale the insanity of it all.

Had she lied on that first day and felt too embarrassed to correct it?

No: she’d been running with it long afterward, elaborating on it over time.

Hang on, let’s take stock, let’s review, Kasia said. Because it wasn’t that she was a liar. These were quite big things, yes, but they weren’t lies at least, they were just big fibs. Fortunately they’d been harmless. We knew Katie. She wasn’t a bad person. She liked us, she liked Kasia—we knew she did.

It was now Friday evening. As we cooked dinner we simply continued remembering, without direction. And details kept snagging. To follow just one thread: Katie’s whole housemate beef had been due to a surprise visit from her mother over Christmas, who was in fact the owner of the house, and the roommate’s de facto landlord. The housemate insisted Katie had said her auntie was visiting, not her mother, which Katie insistently denied to the housemate. But Kasia also only found out Katie’s mother was visiting, not distant family, when Katie dropped out of Wigilia (Polish Christmas-Eve dinner) at our house at the very last minute. This was after Katie had agreed to cook three of the dishes herself—which had thrown a spanner in the works for us somewhat. Dishes which any Pole would know and eat for Wigilia—so Kasia had reeled them off quickly at the time. Too quickly for Katie to write down and look up later. So Katie had needed to pull out. And the Diplomacy game Katie had been telling us about the previous week (the one she’d played a few days before our game): this would have been during this visit of her Mom’s—a game in which the counters hadn’t even been popped out of the cardboard holder, until I started doing this while she told me.

Then there was a flood. Stories we remembered of dramatic injuries or illnesses, never referred to again—they would flare up right before each academic conference panel she was supposed to sit on with Kasia. Offers to drive Kasia places, where Katie would say she knew the way, then take bizarre turns, leaving Kasia running for her train or lecture. And the whopper, which we’d even realized at the time, but then chose to let go of: the last time Katie stayed over to dog-sit for us, we realized the bed hadn’t been slept in. The sheets were starchy and clean. At the time we’d told ourselves she’d probably washed them. But actually, the very first time Katie had stayed around, Kasia found her towel hanging up to dry, only with that starchy crease that towels get from when they’re freshly folded still down its middle. Sure, Kasia had noticed back then, but it had seemed too flagrant—Katie must’ve brought her own towel over, or gone home to shower. But why would she hang the dry towel up? When we checked the first photo of the dogs that she sent us, she was laying with her feet up on the bed with shoes on, visible at the edge of the frame. Had she ever stayed for long enough to take them off? The photos she sent us every day had been sent in clusters around noon and six p.m. Did she set a reminder for it on her phone—or were those the times she drove over? Come to think of it, why had the dogs been so distressed since we’d returned from the last trip? Why were they ridden with fleas after her last stay?

Yes, none of this was provable, but all of it was weird, it was off. And if she hadn’t even stayed over once—all the money it had cost us! Now it looked like she had said yes to our faces, taken our money—only to go and do whatever she’d fancied.

*

Pathological liars are having something of a moment in the media. The Anatomy of Lies wades through the dramatic traumas faked by Elisabeth Finch to further her career as a screenwriter, while in Good on Paper Iliza Shlesinger depicts the dark humor of a relationship with a pathological liar. Apple Cider Vinegar, based on investigative journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano’s The Woman Who Fooled the World, details the lies of Australian wellness influencer Belle Gibson, whose career, built off of a false brain cancer diagnosis, left a trail of devastation. And in publishing, the scandal around the Salt Path is causing quite a stir.

But probably the best account I’ve found online is the six-and-a-half hour TikTok saga, Reesa Teesa’s “Who TF Did I Marry?” Watching it, I sympathized with her insistence upon its mammoth length, with her assertions to “remember this detail,” or that “this bit will be really important later.” It is only with an overwhelming mass of evidence that you can even approach reasonable doubt towards such a dense network of lies. She too felt the need to begin documenting her experience rigorously: her, through contemporaneous voice note diaries, which she began making on instinct; us, through an eventual 22,000 words of notes on memories, conversations, an urge to keep track of what was real that probably appears insane. Reesa Teesa snagged on her own doubts too, with a contrary doubt: “What if they aren’t lying?” Her assembly of the details of quotidian life over hours and hours holds the addictiveness and appeal of the finest poetry, because like metaphor, each simple fact hangs suspended, as you wait for its second, deeper significance to fall into place.

Much of what’s published in popular magazines and journals has been from the perspective of pathological liars themselves. These accounts provide an insight into their fierce internal torment, often with tragic circumstances at the source of their behavior: Joshua Hunt in The New York Times writes of his shame at growing up in poverty, while an anonymous writer for The Candidly describes learning these patterns of thinking and acting from a pathologically-lying parent. But where Hunt’s article is tragic, pitiable, and largely sympathetic—and I want to emphasize, this is all valid and correct—it is also valid and correct that the harm these people can wreak is, to quote Reesa Teesa, “depraved.” Yes, love the sinner—but hate the sin. Curtis and Hart’s study on pathological lying gets at the nub of the issue efficiently:

*

“The very fabric of human society and interpersonal exchanges hinges on an honesty assumption . . . If honesty was always in question, business transactions would grind to a halt, relationships would bog down in endless verifications of sentiments, and interpersonal bonds would strain under questions of loyalty.”

*

Lying is so inimical to the fabric of our society that even our legal systems struggle to ultimately bring justice to the truly wicked: Belle Gibson’s lies included claims that her wellness diet helped to cure her cancer, but she was (only?) fined 410,000 Australian dollars by Australia’s federal court in 2017 for unpaid charity donation promises. To this day she has failed to pay anything, nor has she faced any criminal charges.

*

We began listing everything we could remember. Compiling evidence. We realized we couldn’t handle being the only ones knowing this. It was like being insane. We were living in a reality detached from everyone else’s: everyone else still trusted Katie, and like us, had good reasons to. Hell, Katie was more trustworthy than we were. We were shifty Europeans with no loyalty to the United States. Vocally. Yanks hate that. If we were them, yeah, we’d have believed her over us. So we had to be certain.

And as soon as we tried, it quickly became apparent that almost nothing could be proven. Of course, anything based on conversations alone could reduce down to “he said, she said,” or claims that things were misheard or misunderstood. Even though there were two of us for many of these conversations, people might assume we were just closing ranks—or worse, ganging up on her.

So how could we be sure?

We began with the patterns. Most of the lies directly imitated Kasia: her identity, her memories, her precise edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, even her recipes on Katie’s Instagram. In conversation Katie would echo whatever Kasia had previously said, but she seemingly never added additional details that would have made her stories more believable. This I found surprising. It made it seem unpremeditated, compulsive, and likely improvised at high speeds. Perhaps the need was only triggered after Kasia said something Katie wanted to be true of herself, or felt should be, and the time it took for this feeling to swell and then burst accounted for the delay. These were felt lies, not thought-out ones: reflecting some psychological need, a transformation of reality, of herself, that she wished for. To be like Kasia.

With the many examples of her parroting Kasia’s memories we noticed there was always a slight delay. This helps to explain why she was so believable. If she had instantly replied “me too” every time Kasia shared something, the imitation would have been totally transparent, but after a small interval it somehow wasn’t—whether because it imitated the rhythm of more natural conversations, or simply because the delay stopped the imitation from sounding like a reflex action. Regardless, it was incredibly effective.

I wondered then: should we have noticed sooner? Had we failed to help her, to accept her as she was, that she had to pretend? Is the moral of all this, that we were terrible listeners, terrible friends?

No! Look at how much we have recalled about her! All of it listened to, remembered; all of it thought over!

No, this was her betrayal. But what it says about friendship, that we’d let her in so openly—this was humiliating. All it takes to form what people will tell themselves is a genuine friendship is to mirror them directly over time. That’s it. It’s so easy. Anyone can do it; anyone could get into your life like that. Mirroring Kasia was all she had to do for us to invite her to our home, confide in her, trust her with the access code for our front door and with the care of our dogs and cat. Were we such idiots to view her kindly? For Kasia to believe she’d made one friend here, with whom she shared so much experience?

*

Once we’d exhausted our memories and first observations, we got down to research proper, looking for written evidence of the claims she had made. If she hadn’t made these claims around others, then any that we made about this would look unhinged.

Kasia quickly found elementary grammatical-case errors in the footnotes of her scholarly work when citing Polish sources (the essay was deleted from its shared folder shortly after). Great—though one could argue Katie simply didn’t proofread her footnotes. Early graduate work could be sloppy, that wasn’t uncommon.

Then, checking WhatsApp, Kasia found numerous messages in group chats of Katie claiming to be Polish and able to speak the language. At first glance, then, these messages appeared to have caught her publicly in the lie. But upon reexamination, each message always had a slight ambiguity, enough wiggle room for her to never quite “technically” commit to any lie. Although she once compared a colleague’s bragging to being “like” her making a claim that living in Poland until the age of eight made her an expert—this was not quite the same as saying she actually did live in Poland until the age of eight.

Or, for example, a message saying that she blurted out “cseść” [sic] to a border guard when she last travelled to Austria. Probably calculated to give the impression that she got muddled between languages when switching (just like Kasia). But Katie could also argue that the comment was only intended to show her poor German. She never directly asserted that she was Polish, never incriminated herself fully. Other people in these message threads did reply like they were under the impression that she was Polish—but if push came to shove, it wasn’t obvious how to prove this wasn’t just a mass misunderstanding.

I began to focus on a certain question: how could someone maintain that level of plausible deniability over the long term?

There is an unusual flexibility of meaning in her writing. Digging into the syntax of a typical sentence reveals some fascinating effects: take the following anecdote, in which Katie states she slipped over on some ice and dislocated her knee while on a day trip with a friend. The facts of the incident may well be true (the message was posted in a group chat that her accompanying friend was not in)—although it’s hard to determine exactly what the facts are:

[The friend] called the paramedics and two giant burly Slavic-American guys carried me to the car

If you start asking questions (and in the moment, you never do), then it’s hard to stop: Surely that must have cost a bomb? Was “the car” her car? Why would paramedics carry her to her car, and not to an ambulance? Or was she calling the ambulance “the car”? Did they go on to the hospital, or not? Or did two bystanders carry her to the car? If bystanders, what happened to the paramedics—did they not come at all? Why specify that they were Slavic-American? And who calls “the paramedics” in a crisis—wouldn’t you “call an ambulance”?

The original messages are funny, but they also feel frantic, like the humor is more a function of panic, a coping mechanism. The incident sounds too shocking to appropriately joke back. It’s worth noting that dramatic tales of personal injury are a common pattern described in the literature on pathological liars. (My favorite of the genre came from when Kasia told Katie she’d seen the Hamilton cast in London. Katie matched her and raised her: she’d seen the original cast of Hamilton in New York in 2015. Only, on the way home her family were T-boned in a crash, and Katie broke her back, spending three months in hospital. And more importantly, she had blacked out during the crash, which, oddly, left her with no recollection of the performance whatsoever. Yes—at the time we believed this entirely.)

The collocation of words and ideas in the quoted sentence above is subtly but consistently disordered. This leads to a form of speech that’s rather inaccurate: the meaning is scattered, and it’s hard to grasp. The only way to understand it is to guess at the gist of what she means. Context is required to finalize the meaning: the reader or listener fills in the gaps themselves.

And this is essential. Reexamine the sentence quoted above: because the paramedics and the “Slavic-American guys” belong to clauses in the same sentence linked by “and,” it makes the most sense to presume they’re the same men. But if this interpretation were to become too uncomfortable, the sentence’s disorder would allow Katie to insert multiple possible convenient clarifications wherever necessary. For example:

[The Friend] called the paramedics and [then the phone call ended without them arriving. Instead,] two giant burly Slavic-American guys [who were around in the vicinity] carried me to the car

Only if you read the first sentence back again, it would be bizarre not to assume that, the friend having called the paramedics, two didn’t turn up and carry her away to the hospital in an ambulance. This is the simplest, most obvious interpretation, and the impression she allows to form. Moreover: if you actually concluded from the original example that she’d meant the paramedics never came and bystanders helped her instead, you would either be a poor reader or something of a prophet. (“How could you reach that conclusion from that sentence?” would be the reply to you; “Surely they were paramedics that carried her to the car!”) This demonstrates the ghastly effect of this syntax: probable assumptions are made to look hysterical, and vice versa.

This lack of commitment to an unambiguous meaning can result in some quite humorously garbled word mush in texts where Katie’s back is against the wall. When Kasia recommended that Katie sit down for a simple ten-minute French translation in front of a professor to pass her PhD’s foreign language requirement, rather than embark on a six-week-long French course over the summer (remember: Katie’s mother was French, and she claimed to speak it fluently)—she replied, “it’s very tempting, honestly, and would probably be a good idea.”

The paramedic anecdote may not be a lie—though in my opinion, it would be better if it actually were. Because if it is true she seems unable to directly say it. Even if she isn’t lying continuously, her lies have affected the way she speaks the truth. Remembering conversations with her, we realized that she had never actually committed to saying anything. The effect of this has been utterly corrosive, because the long-term impression of her personality now wriggles like a mirage. We admitted—we were forced to admit, as it’s the kind of thought you hide even from yourself when you’re lonely—that despite all the time we’d spent with her, there had always been a wall, and Kasia never did feel like she’d found a best friend in her. Recalling these conversations, there is in fact never anything to remember past the impression of facts one has created oneself: she never asserted any vivid image or detail long enough for it to truly stick. She became a person that started endlessly falling apart, again and again, with every message we checked, every conversation we recalled. Katie is only a “pole” insofar as she’s an empty field.

*

Kasia meanwhile pursued publicly-available documentary evidence. For starters, Katie’s father’s LinkedIn confirms that he worked at a university in their home state, from the year before Katie was born to her early teenage years, and then from there at another US college in another state until the year of her graduation. The direct transition between the two jobs without an interlude in Poland is confirmed by a university press release, and the continuity of his work there during Katie’s early youth is confirmed by the university website. He did take a short language and literature course at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków fifteen years before she was born—odd for a native speaker. US residency records show them living continuously in their home state until Katie was aged at least eight (the age at which she claims she left Poland for the USA). The class notes of his undergraduate university (like an online yearbook, giving a summary of where the students ended up in life) include a humorous quote from his wife, Katie’s mother: she frequently reminds her husband and their “daughter Katherine” (no mention of another sister) that, having moved to the South for this second job, they are “[natives of their home state] living abroad.”

This, already, was something of a relief. We weren’t mad.

*

The next day Kasia experimented with a trap. She shared several photos from her childhood in Poland in a collage on Instagram to see if Katie would imitate her.

She didn’t have to wait long. Katie commented that “this activated some very deep memories buried in the recesses of my mind.” (Presumably memories unusually similar to Kasia’s own.) Sure enough, the next day Katie shared her own photo of the alleged house she grew up in in Poland. When Kasia messaged to ask where this was, she replied, “My (dad’s) grandparents’ house in Poland! Near Czernichów!” (Again, notice the contorted grammar: do the parentheses clarify it’s her dad’s grandfather, i.e. her great-grandfather? Or her grandfather on her dad’s side?)

The man looked around eighty, Katie about four or five. Sat in shade, he wore brown patent-leather dress shoes, a brown aran sweater, grey lounging trousers finishing at his lower-shins, under which he had pulled up a pair of socks in a smart, elderly American gentleman’s style. His face was definitely not a Polish one.

Katie’s reply of the specific town name was interesting. (I half wondered if she’d been listening to our conversation about us never being told which town she was from through a microphone in our air vent.) Why Czernichów? There were two of them. We know from her Instagram that Katie visited Kraków several years ago during a year abroad in Europe: traveling up from Italy, she probably travelled through Katowice to get to Kraków. Could she have passed through Czernichów back then and stayed there?

With more digging, the man in the photo was identifiable as her paternal grandfather through a photo in his obituary. He was not Polish, but he was married to a Mary, née Mary W——, whose Polish maiden name was the same surname Katie has lately been inserting before her own in her academic work, mirroring the structure of my wife’s name after marriage (with her Polish maiden name first; my British surname, the add-on, second). The obituary mentioned no other siblings of Katie’s, adopted or otherwise.

Following this name, the Polish side of the family tree was finally clear. Mary W——’s record in the April 1930 census lists her as eight years old and born in the US, though her own parents, John and Bertha W——, were born in Poland. Mary had other siblings: a Tadeusz (misspelled in the census “Tadeuor”), who went by Ted, and a Frank; a later census also revealed a younger sister Alice. John had been a shoemaker who owned his own shop; Frank’s obituary confirmed that he and Ted later took it over. While John spoke English, on the 1920 census Bertha didn’t.

Kasia went on to find Mary’s birth certificate, which revealed that Mary’s full name had actually been Marja Franciszka W——. John had actually been a Jan, while Bertha had been a Bronisława, née U——. Kasia was able to trace a ship manifest record from 1912, in which Bronisława U—— had first travelled to the USA from Antwerp, Belgium. Her person of contact was listed as her sister Barbara, five years her senior, who had left two years before her in 1910—the same year Bronisława’s future husband Jan also left Poland.

This was as far back as the American records went; but Kasia was able to locate Katie’s birth certificate—first name Katherine—where she was indeed born just a town over from the university her father worked at in the USA.

*

At one point we thought Katie had been motivated by a fear of not fitting in with us. But she was enough as she was for us to have liked her. The real stories about her life in America—the few true, vivid ones—they were as fascinating and different for us as Poland was for her. Her LinkedIn showed she had worked as a disabilities carer rather than as a teacher before the PhD. Why hide this? It’s something to be proud of, something I respect. But all the lying has dissolved our trust and respect; now even what was genuine isn’t enough to recover it. I hope she gets help.

I’ve been dwelling on that facial expression of hers when she didn’t understand my Polish. It’s the same expression others have now noticed whenever they’ve caught her in a contradiction. Your confusion is always outmatched by hers. When I’ve tried to put myself in her shoes, I’ve imagined continual panic at the thought of being caught, or of trying to keep the lies straight. But she doesn’t even try to keep them straight. And there is no panic in that expression of hers: there is just distaste that her stories aren’t aligning, as if they simply should. Her confusion is so much more confident than your own; it demolishes your disbelief, because she simply doesn’t believe in your disbelief. Her belief in her lie is unwavering.

What Katie has done bears resemblance to Jessica Krug, also an academic, who pretended to be African American. Though certainly not as grave nor as racial an offense, Katie has still adopted a national-cultural identity that isn’t her own. Why wear poleface? These lies in part seem intended to add an extra veneer of legitimacy to her academic work, and to an extra little hint of hardship to her life story that hasn’t been genuinely endured. Though I suspect she has suffered in some manner too. Bruno Grosjean, who published a fabricated Holocaust memoir under the name Binjamin Wilkomirski, was revealed by Stefan Maechler’s investigation to have built his lies around real memories in his childhood (leading to the concept and diagnosis of “Wilkomirski syndrome,” with more currency in the German Sprachraum). Are cases like these a way of reframing childhood trauma in a context that the liar feels is more truly worthy of sympathy, betraying an emaciating insecurity?

Still, you don’t get to subsume your own personal trauma under a whole national identity like it entitles you to a pity passport. There’s more to Polish identity than suffering. And though certain Americans would be well within their rights to say, “I’m Polish American” or “I’m of Polish descent,” as this would be accurate—simply saying “I’m Polish” conflates the two, usually in order to erase the latter.

What is this kink some Americans have with flouting their heritage anyway? It’s irritating to natives, and often accidentally racist. It has the whiff of old obsessions with racial purity: why did Katie describe the paramedics as “Slavic,” a racial term, rather than “Eastern European”—and why was this assumed from their physical features? Some white Americans, for example, seem to find it particularly titillating when there’s American Indian in them, as if it shows their ancestors were incredibly progressive, rather than anything more sinister. (I recall a white American in a bar in Berlin once screaming at me when I asked her name: “I’m Maddy! My grandfather was American Indian!”)

In my first week in the US I walked to my nearest barbershop, which was an African American barbershop; talking with the barber, I brought up that my wife is Polish:

“So am I,” he said, and the guys around him laughed.

I said, “Oh, cool.”

I then thought about saying something to him in Polish—there are black Poles, it isn’t necessarily a ridiculous thing for him to say—but it did seem like a joke I wasn’t getting, so I didn’t. We both went quiet, and the conversation soon moved on.

It took a few months living here to realize what had happened. When certain Americans insert that “I’m Polish,” “I’m Italian,” they are often making a needless ethnic comment. The barber thought I was dropping in my wife’s racial heritage like I couldn’t wait to tell him, and so he sarcastically offered identical needless racial information to mock this. That’s hilarious. I assumed he was talking about nationality, so couldn’t spot the joke.

With a more generous framing one could call all this a romantic yearning to have a deeper, rooted connection to an “old world.” That’s perhaps fair. But it’s one thing to fall in love with a culture, to move there, commit to learning the language, and so on. You can have more than one identity: no one is just “this” or “that.” And, best of all, if you pursue your passions, learn something and live it, that lived embodiment can tie your passion to your identity over time. America always got this right: it has been a country of immigrants, where you could move over and then become “American” in addition to your previous identity. Most European countries do not have this: you may immigrate, but you will always remain a foreigner “who learned our ways,” or something like this. This is most definitely a fault, and it’s something we can learn from the USA.

The problem is that Katie hasn’t gone to that effort.

What has hurt Kasia the most has been the implication that Katie also shared the immigrant experience. Even if Katie has suffered in other ways, she has not known specifically what it was to have people laugh at your accent, or your grammar mistakes, and throw eggs at you for it. Being an immigrant child is a specific, lonely experience: Katie never had to adjust fundamental things about herself, like her name, or how she spoke, only to find that she still hadn’t found belonging. As an adult you grow into a person who leads a liminal existence: you’re in-between places, and neither of them really wants to claim you. Kasia looks at the lives of people she went to school with in Poland and wonders where she would be today if she had stayed. Would she have gone to university? What would she have studied? What would her values be?

Katie pretended she experienced so much of the same, which made Kasia bond with her emotionally so much more than she had with anyone else in a really long time. And all through this, while Katie was insistent she had had the same experience, Kasia filled in the gaps of what she didn’t say, as if these things were too hard to say. Because they are.

*

For a while Kasia had some fun laying traps, which Katie ran at full-tilt, as if relishing the opportunity to lie again. This seemed to have been therapeutic for Katie, because invites suddenly began appearing again for Kasia, as well as regular messages and baked goods. It took Katie too long to notice the heightened frequency of dangerous questions, even though Kasia wasn’t remotely discreet, and she gave too much extra evidence away.

But while this was funny, it ultimately became crushing. Being able to spot lie after lie after lie: it’s continual, endless, like being used and craved as someone else’s drug. Every other sentence is now an insult, and the friendship has turned to ash.

Reality has caught up now that some time has passed. We’ve finally cross-referenced with others, and worked out how deep it goes. Katie created an entire private Tumblr page imitating Kasia online, going by my pet name for her, “Kaś,” and quoting her extensively. She successfully submitted a PhD dissertation proposal modeled directly off of Kasia’s, changing her entire topic over the last few years to mirror Kasia’s focus, archival sources and method. She will likely finish first, which will make Kasia look like the one copying Katie. But nothing can be done about this.

Kasia eventually followed up final leads on Bertha / Bronisława’s story through Polish genealogy websites. From this she was able to confirm a birth year of 1895 in Ulanów, a village right the other side of Kraków from Czernichów (closer to Lublin). Her mother’s name, Franciszka, was the middle name she gave to her daughter Marja Franciszka W——, as is Polish tradition; while her father, Jan, had the same name as her future husband. It felt likely that Katie would have mentioned Ulanów if she had known about it—so seemingly she didn’t. But this was exactly it: as an academic, if she’d actually approached her heritage with curiosity rather than the desire to appear more exotic, she could have known this too.

And in a way, this was the real injustice of all of this: the true story of Bronisława that had been hidden by some nonsense about Czernichów. In deceiving one Polish woman, Katie buried the existence of another: the brave seventeen-year-old who left her village and crossed Europe all the way to Antwerp, probably without any other languages; who arrived in New York without any English either; whose name was finally called in a hall on Ellis Island with a ceiling like snakeskin—no, like rich, rich crocodile leather—by a smartly-dressed immigration official who questioned her for five minutes from a sheet of paper so large it spilled over his desk like the Book of Life; a name she learned to change for simplicity, at first to Bridget, given to the man conducting the 1920 census who spoke rapid English to her and her Jan; and finally settling on Bertha thereafter. A woman who was more than an exotic country of origin, but was a person, from a place, unique as any other. She was the real woman Kasia found at the bottom of this.