No books may be easy to write, per se, but few books have ever sounded more difficult for their author than What You Have Heard Is True seems to have been for Carolyn Forché. “I was trying to avoid writing it,” she tells me over the phone one afternoon. “I was scared to write it. It’s a shocking story. But eventually I just had to write it and let everything else fall away. This one had to be what it was. It was the most difficult story I could imagine telling, so of course I had to circle and avoid it and procrastinate.”

To hear Forché speak of emotional extremes is disorienting: Of all the people I’ve ever interviewed, she’s among the most poised in her speech, the most precise in her language. Each answer she gives sounds like a portion of a lecture, calm and considered. Perhaps this comes from her training as a poet, and her years as a teacher—or perhaps this is just her natural mode. I cannot guess. But if it’s her natural mode, it seems useful given her harrowing subject matter, difficult to write and difficult to live.

What You Have Heard Is True is Forché’s first memoir after a long career as a poet. She begins her story in 1977, when she is 27 years old and living in San Diego. A man arrives at her door—a man she has heard about from a friend. The man is Leonel Gómez Vides, a revolutionary and farmer and intellectual from El Salvador. He invites her to El Salvador. This begins a story of friendship grown somehow in a barren landscape that feels very close to hell, in the midst of the Salvadoran Civil War. Death squads roam the landscape. Her life is directly in danger—all of this terror suggested by Forché in the book’s first pages: “On this day, I will learn that the human head weighs about two and a half kilos, and a child’s head, something less.”

“I realize now how very young [Leonel] was,” Forché tells me. “I didn’t understand that back then. He was only 10 years older than me, but I thought he was quite the grownup and knew how to survive anything. Bullet proof.” (This means he was 37; by comparison, I’m 33 and barely feel like I can survive my morning commute five stops on the subway.)

As for herself, on this journey with him: “I realized how different I was as a young woman than I am now. I was really…how to put this? She was brave, but not intelligently so. She fought back a lot [against Leonel] and was argumentative. She chain-smoked, which I haven’t done in years. Her cigarettes got so annoying to me. She was an idealistic American girl from Michigan who grew up in the working class and found herself, all of a sudden, in this turmoil. What I received was an education in awareness.”

I can’t resist pointing out to Forché something obvious: In the course of her answer, she switches freely between first person and third person. This young woman was her, but is not her. “She’s a character!” Forché laughs. “I think I captured myself as a young person pretty well. But not always flatteringly.” As for Leonel now, he read half of the book before dying in 2009—a sign of just how long this project took Forché to master. “Four versions,” she tells me, “and 15 years.” Before this memoir, her time in El Salvador had been captured in seven poems, but nowhere else.

I should mention that one of those poems, “The Colonel,” is an absolute classic (a line from which gives this memoir its title). In it, Forché visits the home of a military man—a vicious man, whose violence is contrasted against the normalcy of daily life. There’s a cop show on TV; but the walls are covered in broken bottles to wound intruders’ hands. He threatens her with a severed ear. She has often referred to “The Colonel” as a “documentary poem,” but the Colonel himself gets the last, taunting word on the form: “Something for your poetry, no?” he says, brandishing the ear.

For Forché, this book marks an important moment for her. “My work now feels like a mosaic that assembles my entire life,” she says. “I’ve been writing since I was nine years old. Now, all the poems and essays and versions of this book: They’re all swirling into a picture, but like a mosaic, there are cracks in between the pieces….This story has been my own secret, within myself, for many decades….For me, it’s a whole story now. I had to discover lots of things [to tell it]: I had to discover that, when you go to another place, you don’t come back—a changed person comes back.”

There’s power in this—in one individual telling her story (the book’s subtitle, importantly, is A Memoir of Witness and Resistance). “I wanted my son to know this,” Forché tells me, “his generation, and all those Salvadoran students who’ve asked me to talk to them over the years because their parents just can’t—just don’t want to talk about the war. I wanted to tell them a bit about what sort of world their parents were young in, and why they may have chosen to bring them here instead of staying there, and why they chose to flee, to flee the dangers of the war, just as people are fleeing now the criminality in the streets, criminality that was born in the United States, produced by us. I just want to set my part of the record straight. I wanted the world to know about Leonel, and the other people in the book….I wanted the world to know about them and that all of this happened, because these kinds of things are lost to history.”

Benjamin Rybeck is the author of a novel, The Sadness.