Not what story but whose.
When Joan Didion said “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” I’m afraid that she couldn’t have been more right.
This opening line for The White Album sets the tone perfectly for her recollection of the bizarre reality of Los Angeles in the 60s, in the tales she became a part of as a writer. The people she’d met where characters and the places she’d gone were their own worlds. From Linda Kasabian's dress size to Janis Joplin’s appearance at a party. From the enigma known as The Doors to the Cielo Drive murders that ended the decade. These stories and where she entered them were what she lived for because life was far more exciting when it was a story for her to write.
This became most apparent during her documentary when her ascent to success was soured by Death’s entrance into her story. The two hostages it took. Having undergone tragedies unimaginable — the nightmares that we think end when we open our eyes — Didion told herself a story to survive life’s worst. When we grieve and lose the ones that didn’t deserve to go, we want a better story. “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices.” Outliving her husband and daughter wasn’t the story Didion wanted so she did what she’s done her whole life: she wrote her own. Loss, living, and writing are one and the same to Didion — an unholy trinity, even, to explain what it means to simply be human. While she claims that “writing has not yet helped her to see what things mean,” it is the only thing she has ever known. Familiarity is more comforting than we realize in a world that never stops changing. Much to our demise.
However, the assumption that the word “story” is synonymous with “fictitious” is a dangerous one. Who’s to say that the stories we tell ourselves aren’t true? I’m of the mind that most times stories we tell ourselves are just different than the ones that we’re usually told. The image of a house with rooms and walls, but not a home. Shouts of anger behind a wood door that peeled from its attempt to muffle the sound. The pastel yellow wallpaper of my bedroom that I would stare at, holding my knees to my chest beneath my blankets as I waited for it to end. But it never did. I didn’t like that story, the one where I was always afraid, so I told myself another one. That families fought but always made up. That nothing could tear two people who said they loved each other apart. These were the mantras I told myself when my friends talked about how happy their parents were under one roof when I suddenly had two. It took time for me to understand that there are parents that stick together, through thick and thin, but sometimes the thick outweighs the thin and someone can’t breathe.
Even when the word “divorce” became a part of my vocabulary, it took me time to understand that the story I told myself wasn’t false. It just wasn’t mine.
