True Identity

“Who am I?” is a question that has always haunted us. The search for our identity is part of the universal human condition. We experiment with anything and everything in hopes of finding it. But the more we try, the more desperate our longing becomes.

Identity theft is a horrifying and traumatic experience. It's easy to imagine the frustration at being wrongly denied a credit card or loan. Worse are the sleepless nights after threatening phone calls from creditors anxious to retrieve cash loaned in your name. It can also be much more serious. Identity theft is linked to organised crime in illegal immigration and human trafficking, drug couriers, and money laundering: for these criminals, identity theft is a way of avoiding detection.

In 1978, 56-year-old Leoma Patterson left a bar in Clinton, Tennessee, and was never seen again. Six months later, a female skeleton was found on a wooded lakeshore in a neighboring county. The bones were consistent with those of the missing woman, and one of Patterson's daughters recognized a ring found at the death scene as her mother's. The bones were buried, and six years later, a relative of Patterson's - one of the men she was last seen alive with - confessed to killing her. Case closed.

Then There Was You is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Sophie Cachia’s bestselling memoir Then There Was Her. In Then There Was Her, Sophie Cachia revealed how falling in love with a woman turned her whole world upside down. Her story inspired thousands of people to reach out, wanting to share their own journeys of sexual and romantic discovery. Then There Was You is a captivating true life collection of stories told to Sophie about heartbreak, passion, bravery and the healing power of shared experiences.

The slippery online ecosystem is the perfect breeding ground for identities: true, false, and in between. The Internet shorthand IRL - "in real life" - now seems naïve. We no longer question the reality of online experiences but the reality of selfhood in the digital age. In The Secret Life, the essayist and novelist Andrew O'Hagan issues three bulletins from the porous border between cyberspace and IRL.