Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
A Novel About a False Accusation of Sexual Assault? Hear Ayelet Gundar-Goshen Out.
“There was a time when I felt maybe I shouldn’t be writing this novel,” Ayelet Gundar-Goshen tells me over the phone from her home in Israel. “Maybe it’s irresponsible for me, as a woman and as a mother of a young girl, to be writing this novel.”
“This novel” Gundar-Goshen is referring to is The Liar, which tells the story of a young girl in Tel Aviv who falsely accuses a past-his-prime Israeli musician of sexual assault. It brings up ugly questions about the #MeToo movement, about false accusations of sexual assault, and about believing woman. Gundar-Goshen struggled with “writing this novel about a girl making up a sexual assault, when that’s the most frequent argument of predators,” she explained. Ultimately, only around 2% of sexual assault allegations are false, and around 63% of actual assaults go unreported.
Ultimately, she decided to write The Liar. Why? “No one would tell a man he can’t write a story about a pedophile, or would tell a man that you can’t write about a male murderer. No one would tell you you can’t write about a man doing bad things because people might think that all men are murderers and pedophiles. But when it comes to a woman, people are very fast to assume that when you talk about one woman, you talk about all women.” Gundar-Goshen added, “That’s a chauvinistic perspective. And I don’t want to limit myself because of the fear that people who already look at the world through a chauvinistic perspective will continue doing it through my novel.”
In a conversation with Alma, we talked about the #MeToo movement, how The Liar was received in Israel versus how she thinks it will be received in the U.S., and how, spoiler alert, everybody lies.
