I was reading Stephen King’s Joyland, which I’d picked up in a charity shop, over my morning coffee when I encountered the following line:
When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction
Is this fact or fiction, so to speak? This line was unearthed in a work of fiction. And, to further blur the lines, truth can be found in fiction and fiction hidden in truth. But what about what it refers to, in regards to history? Our own history?
Revisionism. I’ve known people alter the facts to suit and justify their own particular narrative. Events recounted that don’t quite match up with our own recollection of things. I guess we all know someone like that.
But what about me? Do I ‘write’ fiction about my past?
I think I’m mostly the opposite. At the time, wherever along my timeline that ‘time’ was, I’d sometimes put a spin on things. Make myself appear more favourable and, forever the storyteller, embellish things for entertainment purposes, playing to the audience.
And of course obscure things I’d prefer not see the light of day. We’re all human and life is a learning curve.
Now, further down the line and removed by years and even decades, I recount how things really were back then from my own perspective (and it’s all about perspective, isn’t it?), with an insight I didn’t possess at the time.
Maybe age brings with it, along with wisdom, a certain candour. A candour maybe recognised by encountering an alternate version of truth in the midst of a work of fiction.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar – Mark Twain.
Then we have the added “fact” of “Is my truth real, or is it something oft repeated by others. Have I embellished it? Misremembered it?”
Now my head hurts!
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Mine too on reading it?!
See the reply to Jude for an added line.
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On gathering information for my family history research, it’s incredible how many times my brother and I have disagreed about the ‘facts’. Maybe it’s a bit like beauty is in the eye of the beholder and we each remember different versions of the same event. So your version is not necessarily fiction….
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Further in this same book was the line : ‘ . . . because passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones’. So maybe that’s the reason.
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P.S. similar to statue bashing – the past was a different country, they did things differently there (badly quoted 🙂
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When people remember the same events in different ways it makes me wonder, if THE truth exists.
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Maybe we all have our own truths, fashioned into a believable narrative.
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A good title for your thesis!
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Your post and the comments made me think…hmmm the truth, the facts, the memories, what are they really? I have to think about this for a long time 🙂
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Let me know if you come up with an answer 🙂
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