The True

In 2019, world-renowned Romanian theater director Alexandru Darie died, the news shocking the creative world. Bringing Darie and Romania vividly to life, The True also tells the story of one courageous woman's cutting through a con artist's web of lies that mirror global corruption.

The True is a hybrid of memoir, true crime, autofiction. Editura Integral is publishing the book in three languages (Romanian, English, and French).

Kornfeld and Darie had been lovers in the 1990s but remained very close friends after breaking up. When he died, Kornfeld went to Romania to search for the reason for his death. It was there she met a young Romanian woman who claimed to have been Darie's girlfriend. Over a two-year period, Kornfeld wrote a book about Darie's death, signed deals with Netflix and Disney for scripts about Darie (and other projects), all to devastatingly discover she had been deeply misled by a con artist.

Readers of Anne Carson, Dave Eggers, Claudia Rankine, and Chris Kraus will love The True. In a post-truth world where objective standards for truth are disappearing, The True limns the slippage between facts, opinion, and belief. Informed by her early life within the experimental theater of downtown New York, Kornfeld draws on a wellspring of language from Molière to Patti Smith, Beckett to Maria Irene Fornes, and the intimacy of defiant theater friends and family.

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Praise for The True

"The True is Sarah Kornfeld's personal exploration of grief and loss. What begins as an examination of a long-ago love affair masterfully propels into a page-turning thriller. Raised in the theater world Kornfeld plays right into the theatrics finding herself center stage struggling to decipher fact from fiction. A hauntingly beautiful tale of love, loss, politics, and art that dares us all not to look away from our own disillusionment. Culminating with a crash and return that reveals while the world perhaps is not as grand as it once was, love even in death, may be the only truth that lives on."

Courtney B. Vance, Tony and Emmy Award-winning Actor and Producer

"I was happily swept away by the passion, politics, pace, humor, heart, and finely tuned skills Kornfeld brings to The True, her astonishing new book."

-Lynn Crawford, author of Shankus & Kitto: A Saga and Paula Regossy

"Sarah Kornfeld's The True is a gorgeously written twenty-first-century postmodern literary work convincing us that we only truly know where we are when on the wrong side of the looking glass. Passion, politics, lust, and theater drag us between the surreal and the real, on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a 'now'-age romance-political thriller. Kornfeld forces us to weigh what we hate against love, or at least find the middle ground between them, in order to fully live."

-September Williams, author of the Chasing Mercury Toxic Trilogy

"The True is a funny, tragic, essential cautionary tale for our post-truth era."

-Jendi Reiter, author of An Incomplete List of My Wishes: Stories; and editor of Winning Writers