Tell Me a Story

"More Americans may remember a story about a goat than any facts about 9/11"
I write a lot of my fiction in the first person.  Even when the voice is more or less me, it’s never exactly me, yet many readers act as if it must have been my real life..  My father was never tried for treason.  I’ve never fallen in love with a character in a video game.  I’m not a middle-aged woman selling a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.  I’m not an Ameri-Asian woman who volunteered for the first Gulf War to get out of the house. B  There was a time when I thought of it as a compliment.  “Gee, I must have been really convincing.”

I don’t think that any more.  I think a lot of readers simply like to “believe” in a story, any story.  I imagine it’s easier when the writer happens to be talented, but I suspect it even happens for writers who aren’t so talented.  There’s something about the human mind that craves connected events in the world.  When you manage to create a narrative,  people actually prefer it to reality.  As a result, they most willingly drop contrary facts, give credulity to the preposterous, or even add in details for you simply to keep the story/narrative intact.  

This seems to have worked in James Frey and JT Leroy/Abbott’s favor.  The personas of the two authors just helped to fill in the stories they had written.  A variety of people simply wanted JT Leroy, the survivor of the most extreme abuse, and James Frey, the full blown outlaw, to exist.  It’s also the same instinct that seems to be working in Sam Alito’s favor right now with the “They made his wife cry by distorting this fine man’s record.”

As I tried to follow the Alito hearings, I was struck by how poorly the Democratic leadership seems to understand this. Instead of developing a counter-narrative, they kept trying to argue, corner, and expose.  Ronald Reagan was extremely good at it.  I remember watching Walter Mondale talk about the need to raise taxes in 1984 and Reagan simply brushing all the very real numbers aside with “this is a great country built on rewarding hard work” and “never underestimate America”.  

A long time ago, I remember reading in a psychology text that the mind has a capacity for both seeing and finding “faces” in images.  In 2005, the faces and story that had the most impact on the war turned out to be the various gold star mothers who took on the president.   For most of August, the president road his mountain bike and played right into the story.  It feels like this lesson was lost on the Democratic leadership except perhaps for John Murtha.  For a quarter of a century, the Republicans have understood that America gets its news and makes its decisions based on People Magazine not the National Section of Time.  

I think it was Poe who said that if a gun appears in a story, it must go off.  The democrats seem to have an odd variation on that.  All they see is the smoking gun and they totally forget about the story.  Once, the public believes the “I” in the story, the votes follow.  


Given the right story, you could probably nominate and confirm J.T. Leroy for the Supreme Court.  

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