The lie I told
In my defence, lying made me honest.
It was 2019 and I’d just started New South Writing’s Creative Writing Programme when the lying began.
I lied right from the start. For two years, week after week, I lied again and again to my tutors and fellow writing students.
Every week I submitted scenes to be workshopped by my classmates, and like everyone on the course, I said I was working on a novel. A completely fictional novel. Any relation to persons living or dead were purely coincidental.
I was the only one who knew that the scenes I shared week in, week out were autobiographical extracts from my own life.
I lied for three reasons:
Writing ‘fiction’ was safe. It protected me: my vulnerability, my ego.
Paradoxically, pretending to write fiction allowed me the freedom to dig deep and be truthful. This made me a much better writer.
I didn’t want people to think everything I wrote was from my life. (I soon realised I was writing ‘autofiction’ and the weird thing about autofiction is that people seem only to take in the ‘auto’ part.)
I’ve always written about my life, always wanted my words to be read. The book I wrote before, during and after that creative writing course was created by mining memories (the auto part), then giving myself creative license to explore whatever came up (the fiction bit).
That’s what I love about autofiction. Authors of autofiction are never going to be embroiled in scandals like Raynor Winn was when she declared The Salt Path was a true story.
If you don’t explicitly claim your story’s true, you can do whatever the hell you like with it.
Take the example of a photograph as a snapshot of memory. There’s a photo somewhere of my little brother on Christmas morning grinning at the camera as he pretends to rip open a present. He’s in our old nineties living room, complete with flowery wallpaper and brown carpet. He’s wearing his Spiderman pyjamas and has a full-on bed-head.
Here’s where things get a bit meta: In my novel, the main character studies this photo, like I have in real life. The character then remembers the moments around the photo, the minutes just before and after it happens. Those moments live in my memory, not as clearly as the details of the photo, but clear enough for me to reach some sort of emotional truth. How well I’ve remembered these moments, I don’t know, but it’s my memory so I describe them as best I can.
We hadn’t had breakfast yet. Everybody, including my little bro, knew no one was allowed to open presents until after breakfast, so he was only pretending for the camera. After the picture was taken, he pretended to open more. He was so excited; laughing and grinning, growing in confidence that he could muck around like that because it was Christmas, because Santa had been, because everything had to be OK – today of all days.
Our dad moved fast, the surprise more the main event than the whack to the head. My little bro was stunned into stillness and silence. With our mum in the kitchen pouring Frosted Flakes into cartoon bowls, me and my sister watched as water filled his eyes like two washing machines sat side-by-side.
That photo exists, so I can describe exactly what it looks like, but the memories around it and how I respond to them – that’s where subjectivity comes in.
How the hell do I know if Mum was pouring Frosted Flakes into our bowls at that exact moment? Did my brother’s eyes really well up like that or did he cower away and run into the kitchen to hug my mum’s legs?
Was the carpet really brown, or was it bright orange?
Even memoirists only write their subjective truth. The way I remember something from 1992 won’t be the same as my mum or sister remembers it.
My family aren’t huge fans of talking about the past, but every now and then I’ll have conversations with my mum that go something like this:
Me: Remember that year when we were kids and we spent the entire summer living at so-and-so’s house because we were getting work done on the house? Wow, that summer went on forever.
Mum: That was a week.
And so it goes.
The point is, I stand by my lie and don’t regret telling it. It got an honest story out of me and onto the page, and for that I’d tell the same lie again.