Perceptions

I imagine myself as Ian McEwan’s Briony. Not in the sense that I was a childish girl (although I may have written childish naïve stories) or in the sense that I mistakenly sent my sister’s lover to prison on false accusations (I’ve never even met one of my sister's lovers); but I could be Briony at the end, after her atonement, as she awaits death to publish her written novel. Me, the writer, struggling draft after draft, edit after edit, to get the most wonderful, complete, fully written novel I could have ever written. Then, awaiting the precise moment when I could publish it and forever be immortalized in the pages of a masterpiece, in the hardback copy of a novel to be read and studied around the world, praised and adorned by The New Yorker.

Yet the basis I’m lacking to be Briony is in her story; the story that makes McEwan’s novel so compelling and gripping. I have no such stories to write about, and can only imagine the banality of what a story of my life would be like.

But that’s the beauty of it. The writer of Briony’s story is not even Briony at all. It is, in fact, McEwan. The novelist. And the writer has the wonderful freedom to create, to expand, to emphasize. I have the power to conjure up stories of fantasy, fiction, and fatality that never need be based on my own experience. I could draw on my life, I suppose—yet that seems risky in itself. Imagine the recognition someone might find, the relation to my life, and the sure to follow assumptions that my novels are nothing more than autobiographies with changed names and places. Even more, what if a person were to recognize themselves as one of my characters? Maybe I could avoid all ambiguity and simply use real people and places, and avoid the firestorm of assumptions. Would they believe my story? Would they accept it?

The fact of the matter remains—there is no way to know. So I will write a story—not necessarily my story (or maybe it is) or the stories of people I know (but they might be), and I’ll leave the rest up to you. Fact, fiction, real, fake. In the end, we have all interpreted the events differently, and there is no sure fire way to know, in Burke’s words, whose terministic screen we are viewing events from. And in the end, that will not matter either; for by the time the words have left my keys and entered the page and then left the page and entered the reader’s mind, the screens have been overlapped and changed; and things have been perceived. And perception is everything.