Running With Asthma

I’ve come to realize that when people tell stories about themselves, they lie through their teeth.  Most of the time it isn’t intentional.  It just happens. This is especially true when writers decide to pen their story, either through a memoir or an autobiography.  A woman will start out by saying she has been through a terrible ordeal and wants to write about it to save other women from the same type of tragedy.  She speaks freely of the horrible details. Once the pen is hand, however, things change.  She suddenly becomes self conscious, feeling as if she is disrobbing in a room full of strangers.  Not wanting to be that vulnerable, she keeps her private parts covered.  The parts she leaves exposed are carefully corrected with makeup, masked with see through garments such as chifon, or adorned with sparkly jewelry.  This is the unreliable narrator.

I’ve come across several such stories in the past few days.  Well intentioned writers have spilled their guts but have kept their souls under lock and key.  One story that I read over the weekend was written by an adult male.  In one chapter, he tells what happened at the age of eight.   The major flaw with the account is that he imposes his adult mindset onto his eight year old self.  He recounts the event with his adult eyes and has his young self solving the problem with his now adult attitude.  The reader can see right past this contradiction and the unreliable narrator is in full swing.  We can no longer trust what the narrator tells us because he is filtering and changing the actual events.  After being shoved off a cliff and plunging into icy water by his father, the eight year old would not say, “screw it, I’ll just make the best of it, I’ll just learn to swim right here and now.”  Instead, the eight year old would probably be wondering why his father betrayed his safety and broke his trust in such a cruel and cold way.

To tell your story in proper fashion, there must be growth.  The reader must see evidence of growth.  Therefore, the writer must re-visit the thought processes that caused the mistakes in the first place.  The writer must be willing to be in seen, or have those close to him seen, in a bad light at first.  Then, as the story continues, the writer (hopefully) learns from his bad decisions and begins to make better choices, thus learning from his mistakes and growing into the person he is today.  This cannot happen, however, if the writer isn’t honest about the starting point of betrayal, insecurity, abandonment, or whatever has caused the imbalance.

Forrest Gump is a classic unreliable narrator.  We can see what he cannot.  Don’t fool yourself into thinking you are covering your tracks when choosing which emotions to show and which to keep hidden.  The page has a way of acting like a window and your reader will see much more than you do.