MyFace

All We Remember: Reflections on Honesty from the Founder of the Church of 80% Sincerity.

People sometimes tease me about the title of my imaginary church. They ask me if I am really sincere, really telling the truth. They wonder if the stories in my show and in my book are actually true stories.

They are true. In some cases I have changed the names, especially when the story might be embarrassing to someone in it. In some cases I have put two or more stories into one story, or compressed a time frame that stretched over several months into one event.

But I do not think it is possible for personal stories to be factually true. All we remember about a particular incident from the past is our feelings about what happened. When we tell a story about something, we recall those feelings and then construct a story from what bits and shards of so-called facts that we can recall.

I recently talked with a psychiatrist at a party. He told me that he had the opportunity to work with a group of US infantrymen who had participated in a military action in a village in Vietnam. For many reasons, it was a horrific event, one that caused post traumatic stress disorder for the men. In the course of working with them, he heard their stories about what had happened. There was a core of truth to the telling of the event that had happened years previously. But details differed significantly to the extent of contradicting one another. Now these stories were told confidentially to a psychiatrist. There was no need for reconciliation of the details, for the determination of facts. All those stories were true. All those men had to make sense of that experience.

I wrote a story entitled “A Roche Family Christmas” about a Christmas eve that took place when I was about 18. A key element in that story was the description of my father introducing my youngest sister, Teresa, to sing “The Huron Christmas Carol” and slurring the pronunciation of “Huron” into “Urine.” Five of my six siblings agreed with my recollection of what had taken place, but Teresa’s memory was that we had all been laughing at her singing. She had kept that memory for thirty some years. She remembered her feelings and constructed a story to make sense of them.

Who among us did not grow up in a family with at least some degree of dysfunction? A lot of the it involved learning methods of filtering reality, of ignoring or redefining events and suppressing the voices of those who might be trying to tell what they saw as the truth. Children should be seen and not heard. We carry these habits of mind into adulthood and believe that our stories are true, in part because our emotional survival seemed to depend on it.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 6:41 pm and is filed under This and That. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.