Trust

January 5, 2026 /

Trust ~ Hernan Diaz

Andrew and Mildred Bevel are the couple at the heart of Trust. Andrew is a stock market billionaire in the 1920s, Mildred is his philanthropist wife. Their story is told through four separate books.

First is a biographic novel, which paints Andrew as an opportunist and Mildred as suffering from mental illness.

Next is an unfinished autobiography, where Andrew works to defend his legacy from the unflattering descriptions of the novel.

Then comes the memoir of the woman who was his ghost writer for the autobiography, who finds Mildred to be the more interesting of the two, even as Andrew works to keep her legacy limited to her kind and loving nature.

Last is Mildred’s journal, where we learn that she is indeed the more interesting of the couple, and we finally understand her genius and her illness.

Reading the first two sections, I didn’t really understand that they were the same person – that the man in the autobiography was the same as the man in the novel, and I thought, ‘Wow, this book is full of asshole white men who are very full of themselves and their genius, isn’t it? I like the writing, but I don’t like these men.’ Once we got to the third section, and understood the reason for the autobiography, the truths and fictions of both books, and got to know a bit more about Mildred, I really enjoyed how it started to come together. Definitely recommended.

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