Perilous Adventures
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Dying in the first person

by n a bourke

 

There’s a novel on my desktop. Or, at least, I call it a novel to avoid saying its true name. Really, it’s something else entirely. Anyway, it’s there, somewhere. Well hidden, often lost, always coming up again like Beowulf’s mother rising to the surface of the ocean when I’m between other novels. It’s been there a long time, this deep-sea story. In fact, it’s the story I’ve been writing for the longest time. The one that haunts every other sentence and story I write. It’s called Dying in the first person, which is, of course, impossible. A narrator cannot die in the first person.

Like you, I wrote horror stories in the fifth grade, which I often attempted to end with the first person narrator’s death. Hand-written and poorly-spelled, they inevitably end with a halffinished word, a too-long ellipsis or a scrawl, as if the ‘writer’ were dragged from the page mid-sentence. They are coming, I wrote when I was eleven, at the end of a gripping saga titled ‘The charwoman’s lament’, I must end heer, but first I will tell you where I haf hidden my treasure. It is in the ha……

Already, I’m avoiding the real story. The not-novel on my desktop is a memoir. It is about my family. It is about my childhood. It is about my father, who died ‘in the first person’ when I was very young, cutting short the narration of his life and taking his secrets—all of his secrets—to his grave. It is also, of course, because it has to be, the story of my mother’s life, and that of my sisters.

I cannot tell it.

That is, I can write it, but I can never allow it to be read. At various times I have struggled with this. I remember Charmian Clift’s invocation for writers—her career advice, if you like. She once said that in order to be a writer you must be prepared to tell all your secrets, and everyone else’s as well. But then, when her husband George Johnston’s memoir was about to be published— in which he had done as she instructed— she, like my father, ended her life/story. Of course, it’s not as simple as that: cause. Effect. But still, it makes me wonder whether she regretted her bravery.

I have come to accept that at some level I will never be a writer. Or, at least, that I will never be the kind of writer for whom the truth is more important than the hurt that its revelation can entail.

The truth is, I cannot tell the whole truth about my family, about my father, or myself. Not now, and perhaps not ever. It is too hard. It is too hurtful. It is too sharp. After so many years it is—still—too raw. It has enormous power to hurt and I have always been afraid of guns.

Once, not so long ago, I let slip a small detail about my family history in an interview. My mother read the interview; I didn’t know she would. I will never forget the shattered, damaged, vulnerable woman who called me. Who wept and shouted. Who was hurt, furious, ashamed, revolted. Whose fury was so wild she could barely utter sentences. This woman, who always knew what to say, and said it with careful and precise clarity, was rendered incoherent with rage. This woman, whose heart I had, once again, broken. My mother.

My family, like many others, is a delicate structure built of history and secrets. The things we know and the things we refuse to acknowledge knock elbows at the table.

There is a pithy homily that says that the truth will set you free. I don’t believe it. Or, at least, I don’t believe it is as simple as that. The truth can be as much of a prison as a lie. The difference, I think, is between the notion of the truth you know, and the truth that you chose to make public. A memoir, a family history, is a dangerous, public thing and must be handled with care and grace; the truth may set you free at the cost of another’s imprisonment.

Here’s another story: I have a friend who was raped. She chose not to make her story public. She didn’t go to the police because she knew the man who had assaulted her, and knew that he knew the police, that they would protect him and not her. Whatever you think of her decision, it was hers to make. Her friend—our mutual friend—is a writer. She wrote a story about this woman and what happened to her. Nothing was hidden, nothing was disguised or veiled. It was an unkind story in which my friend was depicted as foolish, naïve, complicit in her rape because she kept silent, because she was young, beautiful, flirtatious. Nobody was protected; least of all the woman to whom it had happened. There were consequences, when the story was published, but none of them were borne by the writer.

One day I will publish my book, or let someone read it. Perhaps. But I cannot do so today, or tomorrow. I cannot do so while it is still both a story, and a weapon and I am standing here with the gun in my hands, blindfolded, ready to fire.

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