Viet Thanh Nguyen on the Need to Recognize Coexisting Truths

“The Sympathizer” author Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about turning his Pulitzer Prize–winning 2015 novel into a new HBO miniseries of the same name, the polarities between what he calls “narrative plenitude” and “narrative scarcity,” the fickle nature of memory, America as a mythology, and jokes as a form of truth-telling.