the year in truth-telling
I began this year wrapping up Cum Shots, a newsletter I’d started writing June of 2015, because I thought I was in love and it certainly felt like I was and me being in love seemed like a fitting conclusion to the narrative I’d been trying to arrange, in fragments, for the previous eight months. All my letters from January are a mess of ecstasy and hormones and feelings. The final letter was titled “The Garden.” It went out in late February. It was supposed to be the end but also a beginning. Here is the last sentence:
I would like to think I have reminded you how very perilous love is, and also how very light.
Perilous. Of course everyone learns this sooner or later: you try this business of writing long enough and you begin to understand there are no satisfying conclusions. This seems counter to the whole project of nonfiction — by its nature language must be the place where all of this is stored; the place where we go to make sense of the constellating events that make up a life, mine, or yours, or the part where we briefly and strikingly overlapped, and overlap again. There must be some essential truth, right — some substance at the beating heart of a story, a room at the center, a place where the best most fine and lovely interpretation lives. Simply, like: This is how we fell in love; this is how we fell out of it.
But that’s not how any of this works. If it did, we’d already have telepathy, well on our way to achieving a more perfect understanding, and no one would ghost anyone and everyone would come in exactly the way they prefer, and multiple times. You know there’s nothing fine or lovely about language on its own. There’s power in articulation — I think I wrote about that in my last year-end piece — but the mediums we have are yet blunt instruments as is any medium, and there’s so much that’s lost and preserved in each stroke. I’ve begun to think of writing as a process of crystallization. I have to remind myself when I file of all the details I’ve cut out, and when I write about my life I have to remind myself that it’s okay to have memories that aren’t yet written down.
That same month, the month my last letter went out, I wrote about trauma, sexual assault, agency, and narrative in a thinly-disguised review of A Little Life. It was the first in a project of learning how to write book reviews I embarked upon this year. The most striking thing about that particular novel is its descent into darkness, though it’s not the quality of the darkness but its function that’s disturbing. It feels voyeuristic, unwarranted, and representative of a pattern of narrative we’ve all seen emerging in the personal essay as well as fiction, where a subject’s pain becomes integral to and inseparable from their character. In the piece I wanted to ask why we consider suffering a crucible and trauma a means toward building character; I wanted to ask,
What does it say about us that we must see not only how it felt but also how very bad it was?
Then I started working in trauma, probably exactly as a result of writing that review. I’d always wanted to work in sexual violence support and advocacy; I thought I never could because I hadn’t gone to social work school. But I began training to be a rape crisis counselor for the 24/7 hotline that my now-employer, the New York City Anti-Violence Project, runs. I spent Tuesday evenings and all of my Saturdays in a conference room learning the language of crisis counseling and trauma response. I finished the program in March, while interviewing for a job there. In April, I started. Sometime that month, maybe even within the first week, I worked on my first national homicide, putting out media alerts and talking with press; following up with local reporters and the victim’s friends and family.
Now that I work so closely with survivors and victims of violence, the world reverberates at a slightly different frequency. The pigment of everything heightened, like tube watercolors. I often feel porous, and saturated with grief — too full of the knowledge of horrible things. There’s a lot of hate in the world. It makes most things feel small.
There is, too, complexity. There’s no one narrative of violence and when things go wrong, there’s no way you can possibly understand everything as more and more information comes to light. Every case I work on is difficult; every violent thing is difficult. And I cannot tell you the truth, just a truth; I cannot tell you what’s right or who wins or who is good or bad or deserving. There, again, that thing about language: you can never tell the whole story, so the power is yours to decide which story to tell.
In June, I got a call.
I was raped by an employee of the Yale School of Art my senior year of college, but never reported it at the time. I did write an essay about it, which remains one of the most difficult pieces I’ve ever published. That went up in March of last year. However, in situations like these you’re rarely the first and rarely the last, and midsummer of this year — two full years after it happened — I got a call from the Title IX office at Yale, telling me that my name had come up in an investigation. Someone had found my essay, identified my rapist, and alleged that he was doing or trying to do more of the same, to other girls on campus. I was the evidence. I had been one of them.
So the office called me up and explained how the tip had been anonymous, and meanwhile, the person — a fellow survivor — who had called it in contacted me, too, and we talked. Suddenly, I was given a choice: Would I file a complaint? Would I take action? Or would I, as I had every indication of doing from my inaction before, let it fade into silence?
And if it had just been me — if I had only my truth to hold, only my own understanding of what happened that night — I’m not sure I would have gone ahead with it. But I knew that there were others, and that there were others who could be harmed, and so I filed a complaint, hoping to get him removed from his position at the school. There were papers to sign; calls to make, procedures to be explained. I soft-blocked him from my Instagram. (Later, when he violated the no-contact order, I would block him for good.) It wasn’t a criminal investigation; just one conducted within the university. The main thing required of me was an interview with the investigator. Fact-finding, they called it.
Here’s a funny thing about memory: it’s unreliable. I know this, more than I know anything. We tell ourselves stories to keep ourselves alive, and in the telling of those stories we shape our understanding of ourselves — making us braver, better, kinder; or putting ourselves at fault for things that were never in our control. Who am I to know how you have burnished your life; only that I have burnished mine in ways that even I’ve forgotten.
And when you’ve grown in a culture that’s already taught you to blame yourself and you already feel complicit in what happened to you that night and when you are aware as acutely as I am of the malleability of memory I was terrified — can I be honest with you, I am being very honest with you — that somewhere, I’d made it up. That he was innocent; that I was the bad one, having already demonstrated myself to be an unreliable and slutty girl. I was not a perfect victim. There is, I want to tell you, no perfect victim.
Somewhere in all this, I sold a book. I locked myself in my apartment for six weeks and finished a first draft — it helped that by then I was no longer in love, or, he definitely no longer loved me and there was nothing I could do about it — and the writing of it was a breathtaking process of vomit and revision. You can read about that more, and more beautifully, in this essay.
But I’ve been thinking about books, since I had to write one this year. The thing about art is that it doesn’t just assume many worlds are possible, it creates them. Once, a friend referred to reading as traveling, because it situates you so thoroughly elsewhere. I like to think about the moral universes of the books I read; they’re all different, all self-contained, and each offers not another reality, maybe, but a way of returning to look at our own.
While writing my novella I kept returning to these questions of truth and narrative. You must realize now that this has been the theme of the whole thing, examining what’s going on in all of this truth-telling. What makes my memory different from yours? And what happens when I write it down? In the case of my book, which features a nameless protagonist who looks exactly like me, I wanted to confuse the line between fact and fiction. After all, you can tell a truth that isn’t factual, and facts can be made to mean nothing. I wrote about that too, in the context of Fantasian, but you know by now that it can be applied to anything.
Summer turned to fall. I cut off all my hair. I finished up the investigation. Let’s fast-forward to that — how I was so worried that I would not be believed, that I’d written some false rape story in my head. Let’s skip the details — I’ll only tell you that they asked for more than I was expecting to provide, and I hadn’t kept any of our text messages — and I’ll tell you what they told me. “We have determined that a violation occurred that night.”
O, the beauty of the jade plant behind me in the window of the coffee shop in Philadelphia where I took the call. O, the beauty of cold light, bare legs, no cigarettes. O, how grateful I was to be believed.
So I’ve been wrestling with a few questions this year. It’s always been the same ones, like: How could I have declared with such conviction to know what love is? and: What is the purpose of a novel? and: Am I ever going to be loved again? and: What is the truth? and: How will you ever understand what I am saying to you?
I love getting worked up over theoretical questions; it reminds me of when I was in school and all the cool girls who were painters a year older were stressed out about the purpose of painting. I was a painter, too; I loved the existential quibble, the WASPy intellectualism of it all — how elegant to fret over whether paintings are useful, or what makes a novel, or whether the truth exists. It’s this last question that I’ve occupied myself with this year, a year in which I’ve written my own love story at least a dozen times over; a year in which I put my truth in the hands of a committee of men — and they found it good; they found a violation had occurred—it’s been a year in which I’ve published a work of fiction that I think comes closer to telling the truth than anything else I’ve written; a year in which I became responsible, in some small way, for protecting the truths of others, the truths of those who survived and the truths of those who are no longer in this world to defend their own.
And it has been a year in which the industry I am a part of, that I both love and despise, has fragmented beneath us. The scope of our work has widened and drastically diluted. There is very little to be said about the truth when it’s been demonstrated that the truth doesn’t matter, and when much of journalism has splintered into those who write against the coming demagogue, and those who work themselves around it, and meanwhile everything else feels very pointless anyway.
But I’m going to believe — you might as well — in some kind of truth telling, in perhaps not the immutability of fact but our ability to change things through the narratives we choose to tell, and the language in which we choose to tell them. I know I began this essay telling you that language will always fail, and I believe that still, but for now it’s a tool we have at hand, blunt though it remains.
Items linked:
- Cum Shots (a completed series of letters)
- The Garden
- Intimacies (an ongoing series of unarchived letters)
- A Larger Life
- Showing My Hand
- Fantasian, a New Lovers Novella
- The Palette Knife, and Other Stories
- The Unreliable Truth
