The Liar’s Paradox
I write a lot about troubled families, but I am lucky to have one that’s functional. My parents and I are close, my sisters and I squabble over socks but share our shoes, the three of us seven years apart but, miraculously, the same shoe size. When I pass my mother in the kitchen I always smack her bum, pissing her off; my father is newly into chat GIFs, which is a step in the direction of my meme-obsessed sister. All of us are slaves to the cat, who sheds mightily and has an attitude problem.
Because I am a woman and not of America, my fiction is not like other fiction, my fiction is assumed to be autobiographical. It’s a word that’s come up a lot in discussions; more than once I’ve caught a person backtrack and use the word ‘realist’ when what they really mean is ‘really your life.’ I have been advised to take it as a compliment, because it means that my work is believable, that I’ve successfully spun another step in the lies that I weave day after day. I’ve also spent many a dinner party assuaging the concern of my friends, who want to know that I am not being abused at home. I’m very happy, I tell them, which, judging from the looks on their faces, is exactly what a secretly unhappy person would say.
It’s not that I’m offended or upset. But it does get tiring to look up and see another gazing at me with pity.
What if I wrote of alternate worlds, flirted with science fiction, dabbled in magic? But I am interested in this world, and in these people. Besides, I am not speculative by nature, I am extrapolative. The patterns I’m preoccupied by will prevail, between the rings of Saturn or on the moons of Jupiter, whether in this reality or the next.
What if I went the other extreme, and only wrote nonfiction? There would be no more assumption towards autobiography if autobiography were the point. But my actual life is boring, and I cannot curb the impulse to lie, to invent. Remember when I said we were all slaves to the cat? The truth is, my father said to me the other day: “I still can’t accept that we have a cat in this house.”
“Father of mine,” I replied, “you’re nine years too late.”
That, too, is a lie. I call him Daddy, which makes me sound girlish, a term I reframe as Father, Dad, Pa, in retellings, to seem more mature. We are very close. When I think of living all the way here in America, so far away from home, it pains me to know that I won’t stumble home at three in the morning to him rolling his eyes at me, getting ready to go on his 10 or 20-kilometer walks around the island. He’s way fitter than I am. The other day, I told him I was getting ready to go for my morning jog, and he scoffed, amateur.
Make of that what you will.
If I could redo it all, would I scrub my existence from the Internet, disappear into the freedom of anonymity? But therein lies another paradox: we’ve always struggled financially, at least until I made a living off the Internet. I’ve bartered parts of my life, offered my voice and face and opinions up to strangers and the camera in exchange for the financial freedom to write. I’ve been judged hard for that, but I don’t mind living with the consequences of choices I’ve actually made. But to sign up for fiction and be accused of telling the truth will be disconcerting to most.
I don’t mean to complain. To be misunderstood is by far not the hardest part of being a writer; the hardest part is writing, and writing inadequately. Other than that, I feel lucky, I always have. I work hard and suffer a lot, but I cannot say that any of it is disproportionate. I am well-loved, I love well in return. I am not a complicated person and have occasionally benefited from being mistaken for one. Artists have always been misunderstood, but my background in the media has inured me to the opinions of others. I’ve been criticised, bitched about, maligned, slandered, I don’t mind. But, the pity, the pity. That, I cannot stand.
How far will I have to go to earn the right to return home? I am tired of proving that I am happy, I want to return to my stories, to my inventions. Let me lie to you, reader. Take me as I am: a con artist, a schemer who has a way with words. Who wants to take you by the hand, and for us both, slowly, to be able to step out of our lives, tangoing together, slowly, into the next.
