View a FREE sample

Part I (Pages 1 - 62)

• The following version of this book was used to create this Lesson Plan: Forche, Carolyn. What You Have Heard is True. Penguin, 2019.

• This book is written in the first person, and it alternates between the present and past tenses.

• Forche opens the book recounting one of her last trips to El Salvador during the war years in the 1990s during which she came upon a dismembered body.

• Forche remembers thinking that the men she was with should do something besides stand and pray over the body.

• This was the day Forche learned that a human head weighs about two and a half kilos. These few pages include very graphic descriptions of the corpse.

• Forche switches to the past tense in her next chapter (the chapters are not numbered and are also untitled).

• Forche was living in Southern California and working as a teacher and...

(read more Chapter Abstracts)

This section contains 5,388 words (approx. 18 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample