As its name implies, True Confessions is a symposium of the most vivid romances of real life-irresistible masterpieces of realism. Its stories teem with dramatic situations that defy description; tear away the veils of pretense and paint the naked soul in indelible words of truth. These are stories based on fact, naturalistic stories describing intimate life-the lights and shadows, the frailties and falls, the perfect images of lives lived at the extremes of human experience. They pass through the whole gamut of life, evading none of its problems, veiling none of its faults, and telling all of the truth without exaggeration. Our motto is: Straightforward truth rather than circumlocution. This collection does not seek merely to repeat familiar tales. Its purpose is to give voice to experiences that might otherwise remain unspoken-to bring to light events that have played important roles in the lives of men and women and have had much to do with shaping their careers. The stories within these pages do not pretend that human nature is always lofty or admirable. They reveal its weaknesses as plainly as its strengths; its mistakes as honestly as its triumphs. They deal with the shadows as well as the lights, with the frailties and falls that are as much a part of life as courage, devotion, and hope. Each story teaches a lesson by which every reader ought to benefit. We are not one of those persons blessed with such serene indifference to the accumulating woes of this hapless world that we can whistle through graveyards and fiddle while Rome burns. But we remain optimistic about the power of these frank and vivid stories to strike a responsive chord in the hearts and minds of readers. For beneath the sensational circumstances, beneath the mistakes and misfortunes and the strange turns of fate, there remains something unmistakably human. These are confessions of life itself-of the things people conceal, the things they regret, the things they endure, and the things that shape them. They ask the reader not merely to judge, but to understand. And so, with no pretense and no circumlocution, these pages offer what they have always promised: straightforward truth.
