The lines between truth and fiction are often blurred. A lot of what passes for fiction is based on truth: real characters, real events, slightly changed - so that the writer won't be sued! Similarly, sometimes what passes for "truth" has been embellished. Or important parts have been omitted, creating an entirely different scenario...
Why am I thinking about this?Because I enjoy reading books where authors share their lives (not unlike many bloggers do these days). Accompanying a writer along his or her path in life is an adventure and a privilege - and I (the reader) am enriched by what I learn...
Recently I began to re-read
a book I loved the first time I read it, a number of years ago. It seemed particularly pertinent to what I am going through at this stage of life, so I started to read it again. It's the account of a woman dealing with her mother's final illness and death. Not that my mother is ill or dying - but I (like the writer) find myself sad at times, wishing I could hold back the ravages of time.
There is so much universal truth in the plight of the angry, aging mother - and the daughter trying to help her. Like me, the daughter can remember her mother's younger years, and mourns the difference between then and now.
The story was written a while ago, so I make the mistake (perhaps) of going to the internet and researching the author and her family. What has happened to them since the book was published in the 1980s? I knew the author and her husband had died - after her husband's death , she wrote another "journal" about their life together. But what about the other members of the family who make cameo appearances throughout the story? What has happened to them?
The internet is an amazing research tool! I discovered -
among other things - that family members
confided to a journalist that much that had been written in their mother's published "journals" was simply not true. The books paint a different story than they remember experiencing, and the relationships between the characters (real people - children, grandchildren, husband, friends) were not exactly as portrayed.
Had the author viewed her life - and the people in it - through "rose-colored glasses"? Or had she glossed over the truth (and details such as alcoholism and infidelity) for the sake of telling a story?
My first reaction to this controversy was profound sadness - sadness that some of the people in the story had felt misrepresented, according to the journalist who wrote the article.
(But then - I ask myself - did
she embellish their words to make headlines, too?! Is that part of the art of storytelling ...and journalism?)
Also I felt shock and disbelief -
I had trusted the author to tell me the truth!Who can I trust?!I began to reflect on "reality" and "truth": my surprise at discovering that members of my own family didn't always remember events exactly as I remembered them. Was I wrong? Or were they?
Then I recalled an experiment I had read about, where a group of people were asked to witness a certain event. Later they were questioned about what they had seen. To the researchers' surprise, none of them remembered seeing exactly the same thing! (It appears that our personalities - and our expectations - determine what we think we "see.")
Then there is the element of imagination - a essential tool for all writers of fiction. From early childhood, this author had a tendency to live in an imaginative world. In the book I am reading, she explains:
"During my first years... as a solitary child, the world of my imagination and the world of my daily life were not in conflict, because I had not grown up enough to see any difference between them. My real life was not in school but in my stories and my dreams. The people I lived with in books were far more real to me than my classmates..."Was living in her imagination a habit she continued throughout her life?
But to get back to my question:
If, viewing the same incident, we all see something different, how do we know what is true? If my "reality" is not the same as your "reality,"
it's amazing we can communicate at all! Perhaps "truth" is the synthesis of all our points of view - as we share our thoughts and feelings.
(Is "reality" too great for any one of us to grasp alone?!)No wonder we misunderstand each other so often!What all this has shown me - I think - is that, yes - denial exists. But so does imagination. We don't all view events in the same way,
but are enriched by hearing other points of view. This means we won't always see eye to eye. (And, yes, at times
we may feel misrepresented and misunderstood.)
And what about these "journals"... these books I enjoy reading? How do I - as a reader - respond to the criticism that they misrepresent the truth of what really happened?After a lot of thought, I have concluded that, although
I feel cheated, I am still
grateful that the author chose to share
some important threads of her life - even though, to those closest to her, the supposedly autobiographical journals misrepresented the truth.
But I
am grateful for the fragments she did share. My life is richer for reading the wonderful stories.
