the truth (is a lie)

Cover Letter

“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald from “The Crack-Up”

My portfolio will attempt to emulate this concept from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up.”  I connect with this idea of the necessity for an individual to balance their own mind.  I connected with Fitzgerald’s essay the most, this semester, forming parallels between the story he tells and the one I am attempting to through essay-writing in this class. This is a story about breaking with yourself (a past self) and creating a different person with a new identity.   But to understand the product, you must first understand the process.

Upon reflection of my writing, I realize that in all of them I am struggling to articulate the same thing.  Yes, this means the topics and themes are similar.  I saw the process of growing-up to be my primary theme, reflecting upon the mistakes and poor choices of the past and looking optimistically towards the future.  Each of my four essays had a similar mood: angry, urgent, self-deprecating, and reflective.   Style, much more so than theme, became my primary interest from the inception.  

I see myself as a fiction writer.  I’ve seen myself this way for some time now, making a few slashing attempts at the form of the short story and self-publishing a novel a few years back.   I’ve always prided myself in the ability to craft a good story.  In my own fiction writing, I began to notice something.  When I try to write fiction, the reader is tempted to read the work autobiographically, blending fiction and reality.   However, when I try to write nonfiction, the “reality” of my personal experiences, the reader is suspicious of some kind of fictionalization on the author’s part, doubting the intended reality.   Due to this, on some level, I find myself living in a fictionalized construct of the past I have experienced: a world created by the fictional stories I have written throughout my life. 

For me, there was a problem inherent to writing non-fiction.  As soon as I attempted to write from memory, details were created where memory faltered.  No matter how close to the “truth” I modeled my essays, the more fictionalized they would seem to me. The more I tried to create a narrative essay, the more I found myself slipping into the creation of short stories.  And then came the epiphany:  I began this project attempting to flee the curse of fiction writing, but learned, instead, to embrace and overcome it.  I thought I was seeking one or the other, but what I really sought was to find a balance between the fiction and reality. 

In effect, by departing from reality, I sought to comment on reality.  Perhaps I do not think anyone can write without fictionalizing their experiences (and this would become the crux of the giant essay this portfolio contains).  Note: this is not so much lying and lies as it is extrapolations and embellishments.  

I see this medium as a means of understanding.  This is true for both the writer and the reader.  Both converse in a piece, not to learn something about each other, but to learn something about themselves.  With my work, I seek to do just that: realize something about how I view the world, memory, and experience and warmly invite the reader to do the same. May we all learn to grow closer in the process. 

The postings I have included stress my interest in the stylish choices of all the writers I have read, helping to illustrate the philosophy in mind as an approach to writing, in general.  I seek to examine the choices made by writers and the effects those choices have on the reader.  With my writing, I’ll highlight an antagonism with imagination, again expressing the need to balance fiction and reality within writing and perhaps all experiences.  The pieces I have chosen speak to style and imagination.

Finally, I choose to weave my essays together into a much longer interactive, disjunctive memoir, emulating the structure (or lack thereof) and format of many of the writing of the age.   Seeing that all of my essays were, in essence, about the same thing (to me), I decided to tell a traditional tale of a growing up, but resolved to do this in what to me was a unique way.  Recognizing the fictionalization of my own memories, I suggest this is something we all do with our pasts and, to a more devastating extent, our futures, as well.  What follows is a narrative essay, hybrid in essence due to its shifting perspectives and a memoir because of the multiple (un)events of my life chronicled within it.  

-fin-