NANCY & ME

'My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

T. S. Eliot, from The Wasteland (1922)

The small god of the world will never change his ways
And is as whimsical--as on the first of days,
His life might be a bit more fun,
Had you not given him that spark of heaven's sun;
He calls it reason and employs it resolute
To be more brutish than is any brute.

Goethe, from Faust

"There is no happiness in comfort; happiness is brought by suffering. Man is not born to happiness."

Dostoevsky, from Notebooks: Idea of the Novel

NANCY & ME

Notwithstanding those infamous authors who invented the mendacious memoir: Clifford Irving, who in 1972 penned the fictitious autobiography of Howard R. Hughes; Binjamin Wilkomirski (Bruno Doesseekker) whose 1996 memoir, “Fragments,” offers the harrowing, but wholly fictional, story of the Nazi concentration camp he survived as a Latvian Jewish orphan; Misha Defonseca (Monique De Wael), in “Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years,” spins a yarn out of whole cloth about a woman who, rather than living with wolves and killing German soldiers, grew up a Belgium Catholic; Nasdijj, a Native American who, in his youth, was sexually abused by his white father, and in his adult years adopted a child with fetal alcohol syndrome and tended to his brethren suffering from AIDS (his real name is Tim Barrus, a white man whose only writing experience is in the field of gay pornography); Laura Albert (J T Leroy), who in her 2006 novel, “Sarah,” and the short story collection that followed, “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things,” constructed a fiction written in the persona of the son of a West Virginia truck-stop prostitute, after which she had the half-sister of her friend impersonate the fictitious mother in public readings; James Frey, who in 2005 reinvented himself in “Million Little Pieces,” as a hopeless drug addict who sought redemption in rehab (it wasn’t true); Emily Davies, whose pseudo-memoir, “How to Wear Black: Adventures on Fashion’s Frontline,” chronicled her made-up experiences in the fashion world (plagiarized passages were rampant); and Margaret B. Jones (Margaret Seltzer), who gave us the 2007 gang memoir, “Love and Consequences,” this story is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (aren’t all narratives, in some sense, fabrications?)[1].

While the story is true, I don’t have to invent a pseudonym for the subject of this tale. Why, because the name she gave me was made up to begin with. She told me her name was Nancy, and I believed her. But if her name was a lie, her physical presence was very real, sometimes surreal. I intend for her story to be a recurring narrative for awhile. I’ll sort of serialize it and see where it takes us.

[1] Those of you interested in postmodern/poststructuralist (deconstructive) literary theory might consider the case of Paul de Mann. After his death it was discovered that he had written anti-semetic and pro-German articles for the Nazis in the 1940s.