Reconstructing Truth
I am sitting alone in my room turning the pages of a book. However, the book is not visible — only I can see the black words splayed across the off-white paper. I am “overthinking things,” analyzing my life like I would explicate a passage from Aciman’s Enigma Variations or John Rechy’s City of Night. Every moment of pain is coming back to me, tempered only by the hints of sweetness contained in brief instances of joy. I am telling myself my story in order to decided how to keep living.
Storytelling is unescapable. In our recollection of our own past, we are forced to tell a story. This phenomenon is essential to living, and this truth is essential to Joan Didion’s outlook upon storytelling. For her, story is constantly occurring; that is, she lives her life in the movement of narration, always aware of the developing piece in which she is existing. Through this mindset, she is able to live her life and find significance in doing so. Even after the deaths of her husband and her daughter, she continues to find that story, using the traumas to create truth through the play she produced.
As a process, writing is an exercise in both loss itself and reliving that loss for Didion. On one hand, writing provides an outlet to process trauma and release it from one’s self, while, on the other hand, it also forces one to relive that trauma. In particular, this connection between writing, storytelling, and loss resonated with me as an individual often labeled as an introvert. Though writing provides me the opportunity to let go of the pain have suffered in my life, the process of storytelling is one which often goes unchecked within my mind, pushing me inward as I find myself continually inundated by emotionally charged memories.
In regard to the role of Los Angeles upon Didion’s storytelling, one must consider how place and time affect one’s own writing. Regardless of the charged years in which Didion was experiencing Los Angeles, the physical location of an individual most certainly influences one’s writing. For Didion, Los Angeles was a city that was edgy, and this sense affected the voice which manifested within her work written during the time. Furthermore, she had no shortage of news-worthy events, presenting her with a wealth of writing material.
Yet, one must recognize the difficulty in relaying truth. As Lee Gutkind writes in his book You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, “There are many truths to a story and many versions of the same story.” Memory is never completely accurate to the moment, and thus all reconstructions of truth are, in essence, fiction — though certainly a fiction that is responsible to the facts when written within the bounds of journalistic ethics. Struggling with one’s own version of the truth is what makes writing so fascinating, and it is this dilemma that leads writers of all genres to discover new thresholds in their writing abilities.
