In my writing group I've been working on a memoir of my experience in Fiji. I want to be truthful, but of course only know what a young woman in her early twenties would know. I have to settle for being truthful about what I felt then, and reflect on how it seems now decades later. I will never know the truth from others' points of view, or really how that time felt to them. I'm hampered by the fact that my first husband is dead and has been for thirty years. I can't check with him, or any of the people I knew there and then. So the memoir becomes a feeling piece, illusive and forever fragmentary. I could make the book fiction, but I'm more interested these days in the borders of fiction and non-fiction. It seems more honest to be tackling my experience this way. I'm aware that the more an event is related the further it gets from the bare facts. Yet, the question is, does it inch closer to the truth of the experience as it leaves accurate details behind?
When I bring in a few pages of the draft to the group, they often ask for more details of my life, and react viserally to the drama of the events. That may be a good thing in a reader, but it makes me uncomfortable. I feel far removed from those times, and it seems as if they happened to another girl, not myself. I was so different then, innocent and naive, and yet, and yet, she is still there, that girl in me, still stunned that she was treated badly at times, and left to her own devices too often. I was strong, living abroad was a baptism by fire, and I learned and changed and grew. I became myself, knowing what was important to me and what were my limitations. I wouldn't change a thing. But is any of this truth? I have no idea. My attempt is not to lie. Knowing the truth is far more difficult.
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