Character Is Destiny

Sorry I missed the beginning of the week post—I can’t tell whether I am just busy lately or I’m going to wind up changing the schedule. Things are in flux around here, anyway. Stay tuned…

That post title is a slogan from a tshirt my brother designed in university—it’s possible he got it from somewhere but I don’t know where. The slogan has some truth to it but manifestly not the whole truth—I suppose what tshirt slogan ever is the whole truth? Anyway, I had one, and because I keep everything forever, I still had it when I met Mark nearly a decade later. Mark loved that tshirt, and since it was a baggy one for sleeping in (I don’t really wear clothes with words on them out in public, because I am secretly Laura Ingalls WIlder), I just gave it to him, and he wore it to ribbons. I had a new one made for him at a tshirt place downtown, and he wrecked that one, too (Mark definitely does not keep everything forever) and then we were just done with that project.

There are many unexpected things about the Sampsenblum marriage but one that I really ought to have seen coming but didn’t is that I would recreate us as characters. Of course, everyone does this about everyone to some degree—even the one-minute tale about the guy who cut you off on the 401 recasts as a villain what might actually be a very nice social worker from Brampton with the sun in his eyes and his dog’s imminent spaying on his mind. Which is to say, even the most honest stories elide by omission. I don’t think I’ve ever lied in word in the stories I’ve told about Mark and me, but I’ve certainly created the type of stories I wanted to tell in small ways, by making the stories tighter, punchier, and less confusing than they are in real life, and in larger ways, by not telling other stories that would contradict the ones I like best.

I think people who become memoirists on purpose maybe have some sort of intentionality around these things but since i just incidentally and accidentally accreted a memoir over time, I never chose to tell one big story but rather many little stories and then looked back at how they added up, and who we seemed to be as a result. Imagine my surprise! Or maybe that’s impossible—maybe if you largely know me through the stories I tell about myself online, it’s not really possible to imagine me any other way—like it’s not possible to imagine a person you know from work in their home life, or your grade 4 teacher in her roller derby life, etc. Like a pointillist picture, our eyes fill in the gaps with more of the same? Something. Really, I know most people don’t spend that much time thinking about me period, and that’s fine—I don’t expect anyone to. This is more of a thought experiment. Or maybe just another story I’m telling about myself.

It was really listening to the audiobook of These Days Are Numbered that drove it home to me: this is a story about some people named Mark and Rebecca. Having some other lady tell the story made it strange enough for me to see it as a narrative that wasn’t mine. It all happened, but so much else happened too—the memoir was an edit of an edit of whatever I happened to have written down to start with, sometimes only a couple hundred words out of each 24 hours. And yet it worked—it’s a good book and I liked it, as I listened the audiobook (she says modestly). But it had an element of unreality to it because—well, it wasn’t exactly real, if we say the truth is the whole truth. It was the partial truth.

The thing is, I think I think I am a good creator of characters when I write fiction—and there the characters are always partial and if I’m teaching I always tell students that a good writer can write a part to imply the whole. I think I’m decent at that when the whole does not actually exist. So maybe, when the whole does exist and is specifically spilling mustard on the inside of the handle of our dishwasher and then allowing it to harden into gunk without being cleaned up, it’s like I know to much and cannot imagine anyone else imagining it properly? Do you know what I mean?

I mean it is weird to have written a book about myself and Mark. I do not write autobiographical fiction, and although there are details from my life scattered through my fiction, you would have to both know me well and be almost randomly paying attention to notice, say, a description of a classroom, an outfit, a boss, a dog, a sandwich, a roommate that happens to coincide with one that existed in my actual life. And then you would have to care enough to notice, which would largely be pointless, because it truly doesn’t matter. The details pulled from reality in the fiction are indistinguishable, I’m pretty sure, from those pulled from a friend’s anecdotes, or glimpsed in a dream, or conjured out of the whole cloth. And details, after all, are only in service of the world and the characters, which are pure fiction.

And I am real, and the details in the book I wrote about myself are insufficient to conjure me properly, here on my couch in my chenille hoody, having just eaten a popsicle even though we are in the midst of the polar vortex. No detail is enough, which is frustrating. I guess I can never explain myself exactly—are there people that can? It’s a fairly interesting project to try, though to be honest a lot of the time I like trying to explain fictional people better, both because they are easier to understand (since I created them) and more interesting to me (since I created them).