Known to Me Personally
Available Formats:
Kindle eBook · Paperback · Free Reading PDF
Twelve linked stories of witness and record, from a grain scale in 1994 to a notary's last table in 2026. Available as a Kindle eBook and a cream-paper paperback with a page-numbered index, plus a complete free reading PDF with a linked contents and bookmarks, designed for desktop and tablet readers. The audiobook is in production.
About This Book
Twelve stories, twelve people asked for the truth at the moment it costs the most. In Nebraska, a scale man has skimmed two percent off every truck for twenty years, and the one person he wants to spare is the widow his machine just shorted. Off Cameron, a cook on a shrimp boat watches a man go over the rail, and she must decide which of two true stories the record will carry. A crane operator in Baton Rouge reads a load chart into the record knowing what it costs her. A skip tracer in Kern County reads porches for a living and sells a client the wrong address on purpose. In Mathews County, a woman who has run for twelve years under borrowed names stands on a bank while a boy goes through the ice. And in Grant, at a card table at the end of a thirty-two-year practice, a notary finally answers for the dead.
Each story lends a person to the next. The counties are real places. The documents are invented. The witnesses are known to the reader personally.
Known to Me Personally is a linked collection about the space between what happened and what stands in the record, and about the question the law never requires: is this what you want?
Everything weighs more than it says.
How the Book Is Built
The twelve stories run from October of 1994 to September of 2026, and each one lends a minor person to the next story as its center. The crew cook who hears the scale man's one true sentence in the first story becomes the witness under oath in the second. The night watchman who vouched for an hour he slept through becomes the luckiest man in Evangeline Parish. The sixteen-year-old at the raffle's ticket table becomes the crane operator at the center of the deposition. The chain continues through a legal videographer, an imaging technologist, an exonerated man, a podcast producer, a skip tracer, a woman with a borrowed name, an obituarist, and finally the notary herself, who has been passing through the other stories all along, unnamed, with a different room behind her on every screen.
Three of the stories carry formal structures. The fourth is a deposition transcript, complete with caption, exhibits, objections as to form, and an errata sheet. The eighth is a podcast transcript with slates, tape cues, ad reads, and production notes that stand where they stand. The eleventh is told in the future tense, because the rounds are what the obituarist will do with the months he has left. The counties, parishes, towns, and rivers are real places, used with respect. The people are invented. No document quoted in these pages exists.
Holding the whole book is one working figure: a traveling notary who asks every signer a question the law never requires, about the wanting, in ten thousand wordings and never twice the same way. Her practice begins with a quitclaim she stamped in September of 1994 and watched a widow sign with a trembling hand, and it ends at a card table in Grant, thirty-two years later, with an answer given on behalf of the dead.
What the Book Contains
The reading editions run 359 pages in paperback dimensions, with the twelve stories followed by a full back matter built for readers and reading groups.
1. The True Weight · Perkins County, Nebraska, October 1994. The scale man, the sleeve in the dial head, and the widow's last load.
2. Green Water · Cameron Parish, Louisiana, September 1997. A man over the rail, six minutes, and the two true stories.
3. The Luckiest Man in Evangeline Parish · Evangeline Parish, Louisiana, 2001. A palmed draw, a stolen boat, and a clarinet.
4. Objection to Form · Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 2014. The deposition of Mireille Fontenot, with the load chart read into the record whole.
5. Large Print · Portland, Oregon, 2019. A cameraman who cannot stop reading faces, and the one window in twenty-two years of walls.
6. Contrast · Yakima, Washington, 2020. A shadow in the bore, a debt seventeen years old, and nine days of not knowing.
7. Standing Room · Spokane, Washington, 2021. Eighteen years, a refused clause, and a name said right at last.
8. Outgoing Message · Erie, Pennsylvania, 2022. A dead man's voice on the national air, and the correction.
9. Skip · Kern County, California, 2023. A tracer with a code, a ghost with a garden, and the loud lie.
10. A Life in the Third Person · Mathews County, Virginia, 2024. Twelve years of she, and the word that arrives in the store.
11. The Rounds · Mathews County, Virginia, 2025. Six doors, one vow, and the seventh doorstep.
12. Known to Me Personally · Perkins County, Nebraska, 2026. The last appointment of the last day.
The working back matter · acknowledgments, ten questions for discussion, a note on sources naming the book's deliberate liberties, a glossary of the trades' own words, a bibliography, and an index with real page numbers.
From the Text
A witness is an author.
Everything weighs more than it says.
Personally known to me, or satisfactorily proven to me.
For Reading Groups and Book Clubs
The book was built to be argued with. The ten Questions for Discussion in the back matter run from Delma's question and where it arrived too late, to which of the twelve verdicts you would argue with and in whose hearing, to which acts in the book repair harm and which chiefly relieve the person who caused it.
The audiobook is in production, and the narrator's guide, with the pronunciation of every name and the background under every story, will be posted on the Narrators page.
Author Interview
Related Reading
From the Blogs
The Wound Remains Faithful: A Tragedy of Nora · Boles Blogs
The Dying Grove: A Novel Born from the Collision of Joyce and Mycorrhiza · Boles Blogs
The Inheritance: When the Body Remembers What the Mind Cannot · Boles Blogs
Everything Weighs More Than It Says · Prairie Voice
Related Boles Books
Related Boles Properties
Boles.com · The Human Meme Podcast · Prairie Voice · Boles Blogs
About the Author
David Boles is a writer, dramatist, editor, and publisher. A member of the Dramatists Guild since 1984 and a graduate of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University, he has published novels, nonfiction, and dramatic works through David Boles Books Writing and Publishing since 1975. His titles include the Institutional Autopsy trilogy (Carceral Nation, The Claimed Body, Underwritten), The Broadway Machine, Miscast, The Apothecary of Mantua, Beautiful Numbness, Selling Saturday Morning, the Fractional Fiction series, the EleMenTs trilogy, The Borrowed Saint, The Occupied Space, and many other works. He hosts the Human Meme podcast, publishes literary journalism at Prairie Voice, and maintains a web constellation that has been active since 1995.
Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Authors Guild, and PEN America. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.
See Also
Mother Narcissus · Civility Certified · The Wergild · Fractional Fiction Series · About David Boles