You’re Not Always Telling the Story You Think

There are more truths to be found in one story than even the writer is capable of imagining.

I’m always interested in the stories people tell about their loved ones, and how they choose to tell them. When I ask someone to tell me about a significant other, a departed loved one, a best friend, I’m hoping they offer more than a simple physical description, or a list of generalizations or superlatives. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a story: a first meeting, a shared experience, a point of conflict, something wise or funny the person said. I try to pay attention to the storyteller’s tone, timeline, structure, and syntax. I think about what makes their stories sing, and whether they generate more questions. The stories we remember and offer up to others are how we summon our people, try to make them come alive, for those who do not know them. And yet, the same story might give way to many different interpretations for those who hear it.

One story I often tell people about my mother is this: When I was little, perhaps 5 or 6, we got into an argument. I wanted to wound her, so I shouted that I was going to run away and find my real mom—by which I meant my birth mother. My mother didn’t flinch. She didn’t yell. She planted one hand on her hip, and raised the other to point across the room. There’s the door. Why did I share this story? I used to think of it as a quintessential Mom anecdote—easy shorthand for the kind of parent she was: funnier than I gave her credit for when I was a kid, always had my number, liked to call my most ridiculous bluffs.

Some people find this story as amusing as I do now. But others have received it differently. Many years ago, one friend heard it and said, very seriously, that my mother sounded “tough as nails.” What I’d intended for them to glean from that anecdote was an impression, however fleeting, of her sharp sense of humor, and the fact that she was secure enough in her mothering to let my predictable insult roll off her back. They were supposed to pick up on my amusement in hindsight, and laugh with me. Was I telling the story wrong? Should I stop telling it at all? Did it misrepresent her?

When the story I’m writing requires me to create characters out of people in my life, I am naturally, constantly aware of my responsibility to them. I’m trying to craft a portrait of someone real—using stories and descriptions, recreating scenes, and incorporating their own words as I remember them. Even if no book could do them complete justice, I want them to feel whole and nuanced and alive on the page, because they are owed that, because I want you to know something of them, because you can’t care about the story I have to tell if the other characters don’t feel real to you. I have a responsibility to consider the details I share, and to offer them with as much thoughtfulness and precision as possible. I also recognize that there is a power imbalance at work: As the writer, I am the one considering which stories to share, giving you only the details I’ve deemed important.

At the same time, a writer’s power extends only so far. I share what was and what is, as I see it, but the reader still gets to make up their own mind in the end. While writing my first book, I spent months worrying that people might read it and reach conclusions about my family, or about adoption and adoptees, that I hadn’t intended. Eventually, I grew to understand and accept the life it would have as an object in the world, independent of, and not truly belonging to, me. I could write it, and guide readers through it, but couldn’t tell them how to feel. Different people could read the exact same narrative and walk away with different impressions and opinions. And so they have.

When I consume memoir, I love watching a writer bring everything they have learned and experienced to a point of discovery, surprise, or change. This is how we read, too: We aren’t robots, without independent thought or our own complicated histories, who encounter a piece of literature as empty and unquestioning vessels that download only what the writer tells us to. We read and react to the people and the stories they show us as individuals, based on everything we know and feel and have been through. In other words, because of who we are, we will take what we want—or need—from a given story. Each of us has our own relationship to it, and no one else gets to control what form that takes.

I will always be conscious of the inherent tension between trying to tell a very specific story about my life and my family, and knowing that you’ll ultimately take from it what you will. But this is something in which I’ve learned to find a measure of freedom, as well—I don’t have to bear the burden of anticipating and controlling every possible interpretation, because no one possibly could. A story can mean different things to different people, illuminate different truths that resonate at different times. The mother who raised me was funny, often no-nonsense, and sure of her role in my life. She could also be tough and acerbic and stubborn as hell, something that only became fully evident to me in recent years. My friend’s point, if not the precise one I’d set out to make, was correct.

You may share a story and spend a lifetime learning to see its many layers. When I tell true stories, I will always feel a great deal of pressure to get them “right,” and this is a good thing. But I feel less afraid of getting them absolutely wrong when I remember that there are more truths to be found in one story than even the writer is capable of imagining.

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My next book, A Living Remedy, is out on April 4, 2023. I would be so grateful if you wanted to order it (the sooner, the better—preorders are incredibly important for authors!). If you’d like a signed and personalized copy, you can preorder one from Loyalty Bookstores, one of my favorite indie bookstores. Thank you!