Someone Else’s Story
Memoir is a tricky thing, because you trap real people in your life, your past, like insects. They become objects, backdrops, and by definition, secondary characters in your story, somewhat flattened, a necessary fiction. I have written about people who I am certain if they ever read what I wrote, saw how they figured in my story, might take exception to it. They would want to write their version to match their memory and self-image.
I know because a once upon a time very close friend, a writer, wrote about me. Or rather, I appeared in her story. I hadn’t spoken to her for years, we had something of a falling out shortly after college, the details of which maybe I will write about someday, but all you really need to know is after staying at her apartment for a night or two to make way for visitors from out of town (note, dear reader, she had stayed at my house for weeks at a time), she came home late one night and was not pleased to find I had left the door unlocked. (This doesn’t qualify as a defense, but for context — I have always been absent minded). She left me a rather nasty note about it in the morning taped to the door, the key to my own house my family had given her taped to the back.
I was very hurt. The last voice message I left her, a few days after reading the insidious note, I said, “I didn’t know I was staying at the fucking Pentagon!”
What I thought was very telling about this very angry note was she wasn’t the least bit concerned about me sleeping there is her place, unlocked. It was her things, her computer, that concerned her. Anyhow, there was no coming back from that for either of us. I can laugh about it now. What I miss about that friendship is the way we would laugh, together. She was very smart and very funny. She was also a person in pain, the root of which I can’t say I ever really understood. I don’t know that she did either. Or if she did, she chose not to tell me.
Somehow, years after this ugly end to things, we became “friends” on social media. When I saw she published a book, I ordered it right away, thrilled for her, jealous of the accomplishment and excited to read it. I settled into a chair with anticipation. Chapter 1 was a story I was familiar with. It was her story, about a difficult time in high school. About boys and sex. (Looking back I had several friends going through things in high school. I would have my own time to go through things but that came later).
Several pages in, there I was, the virgin friend, by a different name of course, but I recognized myself. I felt used and cheated and cheapened. My character was flat, and served only to make my friend, the narrator, feel more isolated, alone and accused in her more adventuresome (and painful for her) way of being in the world. Where was the friendship that I remembered? How could I be reduced on her pages to a characteristic that I did not think of as particularly defining?
I wish she had written about the time we stayed up all night one summer partying in New York at a club made to look like a cathedral (or was it a cathedral?) when I visited her there. I wish she had written about how we would drink Two Buck Chuck and eat those little mushroom appetizers from Trader Joe’s after our unsatisfactory day jobs. Or how we would chat and ponder over a cup of coffee. I wish she had written about the fun we had going out to this or that bar in LA. Or had she been having fun? This is the question.
I was in her story, marginally, but I was also not in her story. While I happened, in my memory, to have been there for her during a difficult time, it was the difficult time she remembered. I know if I were to ask her about it (which I wouldn’t), she would deny it was me. She would say, Samantha the story is fiction.
To which I would answer, feeling all smart and like I’ve finally figured life out: all stories, true or not, are fiction.
