Memory and Dream

They left the argument unresolved. Izzy needed time to mend both her body and her heart. Her body mended quicker. Long after she was able to get about once more, she still missed John and was no closer to understanding why he wouldn’t come back to her than she’d ever been. He’d been so quick to read her heart before. Why couldn’t he feel her regret now? She’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. She knew that. God, she’d known it not ten minutes after all those horrible things she’d said had come spewing out of her mouth. All she wanted to do now was say she was sorry. She knew she’d always love him, no matter what he was, or where he’d come from. But she couldn’t tell him any of that unless he came to her. She had no way of reaching him herself.

In her worst moments she felt that he did know, but he still refused to return, and that was the worst feeling of all.

Journal Entries

There are no truths, only stories.

—Attributed to Thomas King

Biographies bore me. I don’t care how insightful a biographer is, no one knows what’s going on inside someone else’s head. Autobiographies bore me, too, because we lie to ourselves even more than a biographer does. Here’s what I think the bottom line is: if you’re looking for truth, try fiction. Oh, I can hear the protest already: “But fiction is even more lies.” This is certainly true. But I’ve always believed that the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story. So why have I started a journal? Well, it wasn’t my idea. Truth is, I was dead set against it.

I went into therapy after Izzy moved back to the island. It wasn’t Izzy’s moving away that sent me over the edge—that had been building up for a while. I’ve always had these bouts with depression; I hide them well, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Some mornings it’s all I can do to get out of bed and face another day. So it wasn’t Izzy’s leaving me alone in the apartment so much as it was that I didn’t have anybody around for whom I had to put on a cheerful mask. The thing with pretending you’re in a good mood is that sometimes you can actually trick yourself into feeling better. Without Izzy being there every day, the emptiness I’ve always carried inside me expanded until it threatened to swallow me whole.

So I thought I’d try therapy. Sophie’s been through it. And Wendy. Even Christy, though lord knows why he would have needed it, he always seems so confident, so self-contained. Still, I suppose people say the same thing about me. We’re back to masks, I guess.

Anyway, I went to see this woman that Sophie recommended, Jane Cooke, but it didn’t really seem to help. I’ve always been a talker. I’ll talk to just about anyone about anything—except about myself.

My sessions with Jane weren’t any different. After a couple of months of weekly visits, she was the one who suggested I start keeping a journal.

“You’ve already told me that anything anyone might want to know about you is in your stories,” she said.

“That’s true.”

“But there must still be things you feel a need to communicate, or you’d no longer be writing these stories. Would that be a fair assessment?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever have enough time to tell all the stories I need to tell,” I told her.

Jane smiled. “There’s never enough time, is there?”

“But the stories aren’t enough. I know people who use their writing as therapy, but I don’t get a sense of catharsis from mine. Telling stories is something I have to do, but it’s like the part of me that tells the stories and the part of me that’s always depressed are two separate people. The stories help other people work through their bad times, but they don’t do anything to help me.”

Jane nodded. “Do you keep a journal?” she asked.

“I never really saw the point in it.”

“Well, I’m going to ask you to give it a try.”

I thought I saw what she was getting at. “You want me to write about the things I can’t seem to talk about.”

“You do seem to have an easier time articulating certain concerns on paper.”

“So I write this stuff all down and then I show you the entries.”

Jane shook her head. “No. I want you to think of them as stories that you write just for yourself, instead of for other people. And don’t make any rules for yourself about what goes in the journal except for the fact that you write in it every day. You can write about the day you’re having, or plan to have.

Story ideas, events from the past, philosophical chitchat, anything at all. Think of it as a way for you to have a dialogue with yourself, for yourself. No pressure, no expectations.”

‘just write for me.”

Jane nodded.

I laughed. “Sounds kind of like masturbating.”

Jane smiled in response, but I could see she didn’t agree with me at all. “There’s nothing unhealthy about doing something for yourself,” she said. “Our society has made it seem somehow shameful if we do anything for ourselves and that shouldn’t be the case. We deserve a little downtime to devote to ourselves.”

“Okay,” I said. “So I start a journal. And then what?”

“Then nothing,” Jane said. “I don’t want you to go into this with any sort of preconceptions. Just do it for yourself. Perhaps it will help you recall something that we can discuss in our sessions, perhaps not, but that’s not the reason you should be doing it. I want you to simply talk to yourself on paper. Give it a chance and see how it goes. We can discuss how it makes you feel after a few weeks.”

So that’s what I’m doing here—talking to myself, working on my autobiography, ha, ha—instead of telling stories to other people. But is it still autobiography, if I’m only writing to myself with no plans for publication? I don’t know what it is, or how it’s making me feel. For now I’m just going to do it.

* *

Rereading yesterday’s entry—yes, Dr. Jane, this makes two days in a row, whoopie-do got me thinking about autobiographies again, only from a different perspective, that of celebrities and their public’s seemingly insatiable need to know everything there is to know about them. I mean, People magazine didn’t get so popular because of its dedication to serious journalism.

I know Jane thinks I should be using these pages in a therapeutic manner, but I can see another use for these pages as well and that’s to set the future record straight. I don’t know why I care what people write about me after I’m dead, except that since I invest so much of my time telling the truth in my fiction, I’d hate to see someone play fast and loose with the pieces of my life. I don’t care what they might think of me; but I don’t want lies about my life used to invalidate the stories. My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn’t have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own.

So I realize that while I can use these pages as a journal the way Jane wants me to, I also have to use them to tell my own story. I’ll have to be completely honest. I’ll have to overcome my distaste of autobiography because of the fear of what they’ll say about me if I don’t write this.

The truth is, the success of The Angels of My First Death surprised no one as much as it did me.

But while my friends were all delighted with the newfound fame and freedom from monetary worries that the sales of that first book brought me, I could only think: what if when I die, my biographer goes to Margaret and gets her version of my early years, rather than the truth? Izzy and Alan and Jilly and the rest of them, they can fill in my Newford years, but going back to what brought me scurrying into the city—I’m the only one who can tell that story.

So that’s what brings me here: therapy and fear. But I’m going to compromise. I’ll tell the truth—I’ll always tell the truth in these pages—but I’ll do it in my own way.

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