Laurabelle’s Blog

The inter-blog discussion of oblique writing has morphed into one of truth in blogging. How much skewing of literal truth is acceptable in a personal, autobiographical blog? Obviously there's never going to be any agreement among all the participants (after all, this is blog-world), but it's an interesting subject and perhaps very revealing of personalities.

I'm not sure where I stand on this issue. From what I know of myself, I feel I should agree with Dorothea, who says,

Nobody writes everything, even everything that is completely licit to write. You don't care what I had for dinner last night, and more to the point, I don't either. And most of us have barbed-wire fences around things we just don't talk about. We do tend to acknowledge those areas, though, make it explicit where the barbed wire is. At least, I do.

There's a difference between that and intentional misrepresentation of stated events. There's a difference between that and passing off knowingly-created fictions as truth (small t). There just is. I, for one, do not appreciate having to redraw the lines between truth and fiction in my mind. I have enough trouble with that as it is.

I too am gullible, in the sense that I want to believe what people tell me. I believe what people write on their blogs; I believe that Anna Pickard is a dramaturgy student, that Burningbird's real name is Shelley Powers. I could be wrong; they could be lying to me, in these or a million other ways. There are people who lie about their identity in ways that are harmful not only to other people but to themselves. There are even Pulitzer-winning professors who do it. There's no question that I hate that kind of lie, and that I would feel at least somewhat betrayed if I found out that a blog I believed in was complete fiction.

I certainly share Dorothea's experience of literary disillusionment; I think there's a part of me that still believes in Florin, Guilder, and S. Morgenstern's The Princess Bride. (I got so frustrated with encyclopædias that insisted Florin and Guilder were names for Dutch currency and not countries! I concluded that they must be somewhere in the Netherlands.) The same part of me wants to believe in the Hames of Sister Light, Sister Dark. But I accept that it's my fault for wanting to believe in something that no one ever claimed was other than fiction. I wanted to believe, and belief made it fun.

While there never was a historian named Morgenstern who wrote a history of Florin, that fact doesn't change the truth of a story about true love and family. Fiction isn't less true than non-fiction; you just have to read it with a different set of glasses. Steve Himmer expresses it extremely well:

The blog as literature encourages a focus on the true narrator/storyteller/author rather than the real—I don't know if Jonathon ever dated a woman named Ikuko for real, but I know that I believe the stories he tells about her.

The way I see it, Jonathon has two kinds of posts, fiction and non-fiction. They describe the same person in different ways. They tell the same truth about Jonathon and who he is.

That's it: where my own interests lie. In other words, hardly anything to do with telling the literal truth; and everything to do with fashioning an authentic persona from bits of alibis and consistent lies.

As long as Jonathon speaks with his own honest voice, I don't mind if he fudges the details. For me it's all about motivation. New Girl lied to deceive, to make herself more attractive. But even if there is no Ikuko, there is still a story about names, a story embodying a truth that is more than facts.

I think that I may end up writing like Jonathon — some literal truth, some fuzzy truth. I want to write about Emily, but I can't tell her story without betraying the trust she placed in me, the trust which is nearly all I have left of her. Therefore I must discover, like Jonathon, how to share her soul without betraying her confidence.