Tuesday
Jul192011
Our Life Narratives, The Problem Of Truth, And The Natural Elasticity Of Our Perception
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
The other day, I wrote seven short dust-jacket synopses of my early twenties. Each synopsis was about the same period of of my life, but the different focus of each of them made it sound like I was writing about completely different times and people.
None of them was a lie. Each synopsis was simply organized around a separate theme that threaded itself through my life.
I wrote the synopses as an exercise to show a friend how elastic our life narratives really are. She has been struggling with writing the truth of her story, and I wanted to help her see how maleable this so-called truth can be depending on the message we want to deliver.
Pushing and pulling our narratives into particular shapes is not essentially deceitful. It is something we all do all the time. We push our own experiences into the service of particular messages either to make ourselves look at our own lives in a certain way or to engage and teach others about a particular idea.
For instance, I have spent much of my time in the years since my early twenties concentrating almost primarily on the events that point out how I hurt someone terribly that I loved very much. It's obvious that much more went on over those years aside from instances of my being immature and thoughtless, but I chose to focus on the narrative that best supported my guilt. I was not only immature and thoughtless during those years, and so the narrative I chose to obsess over is obviously not the whole story.
The storyline that stars me as a duplicitous cuckold is not a lie, but it definitely isn't representative of my entire early twenties. It is but one narrative in a sea of many, and it has been my go-to tool for self-flagellation for nearly two decades.
Where the truth lies beyond the facts is difficult, if not impossible, to suss out, and I lean into the belief that there is no essential truth to find in an absolute sense. Every story is not only coloured but also, at root, created by our individual perspectives. Narratives that reach beyond the factual accounting of times and dates rely on the individual perspective of the narrator and the perceived needs of the narrator and/or audience to grow the flesh that allows them to be more than grocery lists of events.
The meaning within our stories happens beyond the accounting of the facts.
Instead of those seven dust-jacket synopses, I could have written hundreds of thousands of pages, if not millions, detailing the ins and outs of my days over that five-year period. I could tell you about every toothbrush I bought and what time I woke up every morning for 1826 days and how many steps I took to the corner of Broadway and 11th before turning right at 2:37 in the afternoon on the 3rd of July in 1995, but I doubt there would be much value in the chronological, technical minutiae of nearly two thousand days.
Does the truth of my life story lie only in the facts? No, but neither can it be found in the narrative choices I make to tell you about my chosen thread. The truth of my life shifts in both small and large ways with each movement I make, and my perspective on all of the stories from my days before this moment shift along with it.
I wonder sometimes if the divide between fiction and nonfiction when it comes to personal narrative is at least partially defined by intention. My intention is to be honest here to the best of my abilities. I won't lie outright about the facts of where I've been and what I do and who I am, but I am certain that self-deception and ignorance lead to inaccuracies at times.
This wandering line between fiction and nonfiction used to worry me. How honest was I being? Had my being fanciful dipped into too much twisting of the truth? Was my own perception of the meaning in a story actually a perversion of the empirical data?
I worry less now about digging away at what I once hoped to be the absolute truth. A story I told ten years ago through the lens of my 28-year-old self has changed now that I see it through my 38-year-old self's lens, and yet what I see in that story is no less or more true now than it was then. Meaning is shifty that way. It's not like a receipt stapled into a tax file.
We don't get to take comfort in absolute truth. Clinging to absolutes is a sign of fear and panic, not rightness and conviction.
I am by no means advocating that all personal narratives are the equivalent of fiction and that we should all lie with impunity unto the service of the story and its message. What I am advocating for is the therapeutic acknowledgement of the natural elasticity of our perception of our own lives and the allowance for the stories we tell ourselves to grow and to change as we do.
Bits of yourself speak to you from your past about what happened then, and the you of now speaks to those stories about how they sit in the context of all that has happened since, and you become a powder keg of stories informing stories.
Instead of fussing over a phantom essential truth behind our personal experience, I find it more useful to look into the meaning within the shifting sands of our narratives, to dig into the why and how of the stories we tell. When I write about my life, I ask myself:
Why this story, and why tell it now?
Who am I within this story, what role am I taking, and why do I see myself in that position?
What judgments of myself and others are framed by the story, why are those judgments there, and what purpose do my judgments serve within the story?
If I told this story from another angle — if I chose to write about what the food at the table evoked rather than the particulars of the dinner conversation, for example — what would it convey?
Have I treated each of the story's foundational elements with respect and compassion so that I can understand why they are there and how they interact with the other parts of the story?
What triggered my need to tell this particular story now?
What does the story have to offer myself and others by its being told?
Do you struggle with the line between fiction and nonfiction in your personal narratives? What drives you to tell your stories? What keeps you from telling some of them?
None of them was a lie. Each synopsis was simply organized around a separate theme that threaded itself through my life.
I wrote the synopses as an exercise to show a friend how elastic our life narratives really are. She has been struggling with writing the truth of her story, and I wanted to help her see how maleable this so-called truth can be depending on the message we want to deliver.
Pushing and pulling our narratives into particular shapes is not essentially deceitful. It is something we all do all the time. We push our own experiences into the service of particular messages either to make ourselves look at our own lives in a certain way or to engage and teach others about a particular idea.
For instance, I have spent much of my time in the years since my early twenties concentrating almost primarily on the events that point out how I hurt someone terribly that I loved very much. It's obvious that much more went on over those years aside from instances of my being immature and thoughtless, but I chose to focus on the narrative that best supported my guilt. I was not only immature and thoughtless during those years, and so the narrative I chose to obsess over is obviously not the whole story.
The storyline that stars me as a duplicitous cuckold is not a lie, but it definitely isn't representative of my entire early twenties. It is but one narrative in a sea of many, and it has been my go-to tool for self-flagellation for nearly two decades.
Where the truth lies beyond the facts is difficult, if not impossible, to suss out, and I lean into the belief that there is no essential truth to find in an absolute sense. Every story is not only coloured but also, at root, created by our individual perspectives. Narratives that reach beyond the factual accounting of times and dates rely on the individual perspective of the narrator and the perceived needs of the narrator and/or audience to grow the flesh that allows them to be more than grocery lists of events.
The meaning within our stories happens beyond the accounting of the facts.
Instead of those seven dust-jacket synopses, I could have written hundreds of thousands of pages, if not millions, detailing the ins and outs of my days over that five-year period. I could tell you about every toothbrush I bought and what time I woke up every morning for 1826 days and how many steps I took to the corner of Broadway and 11th before turning right at 2:37 in the afternoon on the 3rd of July in 1995, but I doubt there would be much value in the chronological, technical minutiae of nearly two thousand days.
Does the truth of my life story lie only in the facts? No, but neither can it be found in the narrative choices I make to tell you about my chosen thread. The truth of my life shifts in both small and large ways with each movement I make, and my perspective on all of the stories from my days before this moment shift along with it.
I wonder sometimes if the divide between fiction and nonfiction when it comes to personal narrative is at least partially defined by intention. My intention is to be honest here to the best of my abilities. I won't lie outright about the facts of where I've been and what I do and who I am, but I am certain that self-deception and ignorance lead to inaccuracies at times.
This wandering line between fiction and nonfiction used to worry me. How honest was I being? Had my being fanciful dipped into too much twisting of the truth? Was my own perception of the meaning in a story actually a perversion of the empirical data?
I worry less now about digging away at what I once hoped to be the absolute truth. A story I told ten years ago through the lens of my 28-year-old self has changed now that I see it through my 38-year-old self's lens, and yet what I see in that story is no less or more true now than it was then. Meaning is shifty that way. It's not like a receipt stapled into a tax file.
We don't get to take comfort in absolute truth. Clinging to absolutes is a sign of fear and panic, not rightness and conviction.
I am by no means advocating that all personal narratives are the equivalent of fiction and that we should all lie with impunity unto the service of the story and its message. What I am advocating for is the therapeutic acknowledgement of the natural elasticity of our perception of our own lives and the allowance for the stories we tell ourselves to grow and to change as we do.
Bits of yourself speak to you from your past about what happened then, and the you of now speaks to those stories about how they sit in the context of all that has happened since, and you become a powder keg of stories informing stories.
Instead of fussing over a phantom essential truth behind our personal experience, I find it more useful to look into the meaning within the shifting sands of our narratives, to dig into the why and how of the stories we tell. When I write about my life, I ask myself:
Do you struggle with the line between fiction and nonfiction in your personal narratives? What drives you to tell your stories? What keeps you from telling some of them?
categorized in writing and blogging and tagged in blogging, fiction, narrative, nonfiction, stories, storytelling, truth, writing
writing and blogging and tagged in blogging, fiction, narrative, nonfiction, stories, storytelling, truth, writing 
Reader Comments (20)
Schmutzie, this is an amazing post, both because of your honesty and fluency of writing, and because it resonates very deeply with me and how and why I choose to write personal narratives. As I began to read, I was going to copy and paste a passage here into the comment box as my favorite part of the post, but as I kept reading there were so many awesome lines that instead I'm going to bookmark this and use it as a personal reference for my future writings. Thank you for providing that!
And, to answer your questions, I function very similarly to you when telling personal narratives. I don't worry too much about the "truth" or about the fictionalization of my non-fiction adventures because everything I write whether it happened yesterday or thirty years ago is in the past, and there's no way I can remember everything about it, nor would I want to, so I allow myself to craft the story to my liking, like you, so that the story is interesting to readers and is focused on whatever aspect of the story--whatever message--I'm trying to convey. The only thing that keeps me telling some stories is if I know that a particular person or person will read them and could be hurt by them. Since that rarely is an issue, I feel pretty free to write whatever I want. Well, I guess the other thing that prevents me from telling stories is my own self-doubt about the quality of writing, but that's another story. . .hehe.
okay, I'll stop rambling. . . thanks again for an awesome post!
This is terrific.
And, I think, absolutely right.
(Probably why I called it terrific, eh?)
Impressive! I have often felt this way, but what has stopped me from telling my personal narratives is the idea that I could be just..wrong. Yes, it is my perspective, but maybe it isn't what actually happened. I use James Frey as an example of What Not To Do. I am halted by my less-than-perfect memory and the thought that I would accidentally fabricate the experiences in my life to make my choices sound better. I am not talking about doing so purposely. I wonder if James Frey felt that way, too.
Oh, Schmutzie, you make me smarter every time! Thank you.
How do you stand being so brilliant all the damn time?
You need a Google+ button!
Your friend is very lucky to have you. So you know. Also, this post is so very timely, inspiring and needed right now, I feel like I won the lottery reading it.
Much mulling over your words will be done.
Thank you my guru.
Thank you for writing all of this out and processing it with us at the same time. I love your honesty and your perspective. Im rebranding and moving my blog soon, and thinking about my focus and why I write is something I've been working on.. this is timely for me as well.
Brilliant writing on a slippery subject. I spent the last year and a half burying both my Mom and Dad, cleaning out a home of 45 years and interacting with family I had virtually no contact with the last 20 years. I had told myself many stories over the years of how it was growing up here in Edmonton, why I left for Vancouver, and my relationship with my parents. And they were all true and served a purpose. But being here in the house I grew up in and have now sold has given me not only different stories but a far deeper richer perspective. I knew this time of stress would also be an opportunity to grow but only if I brought awareness and an open-mindedness to the process which involved turning the stories around in my mind like a prism to see all the colours of truth.
A brilliant essay. Now take your understanding of truths as applied to autobiography and biography and apply it to the profession of historian. That will give you an idea of the difficulty of writing "The History of... a battle, a country, a movement, an ideology, a century...". History is not just "one damn thing after another any more than is your life or anyone's . I am passing this link on to the two "professional" historians in the family, LynnieC and her cousin Maryanne.
In the book 1984 George Orwell said "What happens to you here is forever.” and that may indeed be so. But what he doesn’t account for is how we tell it, for in the telling we change how “what happens to you” turns out.
I love the pictures you chose for this post - the glass and the story told from the may different angles. Beautiful.
the *many* different angles.
I'm not sure that when it comes to personal narrative, there's any such thing as non-fiction. Maybe that's the fluidity you're getting at here so eloquently.
I am one who leans toward the details and the chronology. I struggle online with the incompleteness of the narrative because I've hurt people and made agreements to prevent that happening again...to whatever extent possible. Since the story is seamless in my head I forget that readers, even friends and family, don't know the whole of it and never can. I guess I keep writing so they'll know as much of the pie as I can manage to tell them.
I wholeheartedly agree with you about truth, absolutes, and perspectivism. One needn't wade too deeply into studies of the human mind to find out that our sense of self is basically just a large collection of confabulations, created post hoc to provide meaning and reasons for events. As far as truth goes, I've run across a nice philosophical term for my belief: 'plural realism'. Two different perspectives about reality may both happen to be true, as long as they are ultimately complementary. For example, where I see a rotten apple, a fly may see a nice egg-laying site. Both views are correct.
thank you for this wonderful birthday gift. I've been working on my memoir for a while now and as i prepare to leave for Iowa for a weeklong course on memoir writing, I will surely keep all this in mind. As usual, beautifully written, honest and informative.
Thank you.
There's no way to be perfectly honest in non-fiction. You can only do that in fiction. Maybe that's why autobiographical fiction is the best kind of memoir.
Your ideas here remind me of Tim O'Brien's comments about "how to tell a true story" in The Things They Carried." I love the idea of the dust jacket memoir.
What keeps me from telling them? Insecurity. I had a public blog, but I was too afraid to write about friends or family so I went private. I mean...I'm out there, but no one knows who I am. Back to Square One, I guess.
I just came across your blog and I really love this post; you say a lot of really great things here and you've inspired me to try out this 'dust jacket' thing for myself. I can't help but wonder, is there a chance of you posting any of your dust jackets?
just stumbled upon your blog and so glad I did. this post was poignant and I felt it really apply to me as I struggle to encapsulate my own narratives. also: loving your photography!