I’m often asked about the nature of truth in Precious, my debut novel. Perhaps it’s because readers are familiar with the adage that first novels are often thinly veiled autobiographies, or perhaps it’s because readers inherently understand that writers do not create entire worlds from thin air—there has to be some fodder, grounded in the real world. But for whatever reason, at book club discussions and at readings or over coffee, people want to know what events in the novel are real events. I always respond quickly. When I was young, I say, my seventeen-year-old sister Carole ran away from home, and I’ve never seen her again. After thirty years, it could be that the statement has become rote, or it could be that, through repetition, the feelings inherent in that statement—the sadness or shame or anger—are equally muted and dry. Because what happens next is generally this: The questioner pauses, hesitates. He or she might lean forward, as if expecting and sensing there is more to tell. It’s always then that my own old, dumbfounded silence creeps in, for it always seems to me that truth is difficult for a variety of reasons. First, I didn’t write a memoir or an autobiography. I wrote a fiction. And as fiction the work has to stand on its own; what I do or don’t say about my personal life bears little to no real importance except as an aside or an endnote. Second, there is my family and their privacy to consider. My family is alive and well and there is the question of loyalty, which is something that always pulls me in various directions all at once: loyalty to my sister and to her memory, loyalty to my parents, and loyalty to myself. And there is also my loyalty to readers who, after all, only ask such questions after they have taken the time to become invested in the world of the book. “But is your sister okay?” they ask, genuinely concerned. “What happened?”
For this I have no good answer.
Then I think that I am the one who is hiding, because truths are painful for writers—truths are painful for us all—and truths, as I see them, are precarious things anyway, particularly when, as memories, they are hindered by the long years, fragmented by time. I was five, I remind myself, when my sister ran away, and even that is a statement that I have had to amend.
Hide-and-seek. The day Carole left was, to my still five-year-old and slightly criminal mind, a day of games. My sister was at work, but I had already decided (in the way I frequently made decisions for my older brothers and sisters) that when she got home we would play a game of hide-and-seek. Under the kitchen table I went. The kitchen was dim, the floor cold and smooth. I don’t know how long I waited; for children, minutes can feel like hours, hours like days. I’m sure I felt anticipation at the thought of my sister’s arrival. I’m sure I felt that peculiar sort of giddy dread of wanting to be found yet also wanting to stay hidden.
When my sister finally did come through the door there was no friendly greeting to my mother (whom I seem to recall was also there in the kitchen), but rather an explosion of yelling and tears. “That’s it!” my sister screamed. “I’m leaving.”
Next, where there should be more action—a succession of movements or some dialogue, or the escalation of an argument between what I eventually learned was my sister and my father, the details of which I still don’t know to this day—there is, in my memory, only white space, blankness.
I once heard a writer talk about the notion of truth in fiction. He was relating an event from his life, one that later inspired a short story. He and his girlfriend of two years had had an argument, over all things, about how he stacked dishes in the dishwasher. The argument swelled in the way they often do. It was early and he hadn’t yet showered and dressed. The fight made him late for work. In his anger and haste, he dressed quickly, and in the process of rummaging for clothes, pulled out one blue sock and one black sock from the drawer. Later that morning he looked down and discovered the mismatched pair. At the same moment, a song was playing over the sound system at the store where he worked. I have always imagined it must have been a sad song, because he said that for some reason the music, together with the mismatched socks, led him to a further realization, a very plain truth: The relationship would fail.
Years later, he wrote a story about the end of a relationship. Most details of the breakup were different from those of his own. The couple in the story was much older and long married. There was no argument over dishes or incompatibility. The reason for the breakup was not the same, though the feeling of loss was similar, I’m sure. However, there were two lines about, of all things, a pair of mismatched socks. The other lines—all of them, really—were crafted to bolster and sustain those two lines of truth taken from his personal life, that little detail that, for whatever reason, was long held in his memory and seemed to contain something worthy of a story. What the narrative afforded was a new context and meaning, a place to put a fragmented image, a way to breathe life into a single, lost moment again.
This is the truth: I don’t remember how long I stayed under the table the day my sister left home forever. I don’t recall if I scrambled out and ran after her, perhaps wanting to soothe her or perhaps even wanting a bit of gossip—to find out what exactly had happened to make her issue such a proclamation as That’s it! I’m leaving. Or perhaps I simply kept waiting, magically willing away the chaos of the house, the tears, and the screaming. What I remember next is another fragmented image of that same day: I stood outside. It was a terribly hot day, very sunny. My sister rode off down the drive on her bicycle. That is the last image of her I hold in my mind, the last time I ever saw her. In reality my mother might have been outside, too, or my father, or my brothers, but in memory this scene is made very intimate—there is only my sister and me, her pedaling off, my watching her leave.
Then, more white space.
That day my mother, who was always well-meaning, didn’t want me to be upset, so she called my oldest sister and charged her with my care for the rest of the day. After Carole left, my other sister took me and a friend to a local amusement park. I remember sitting in the back seat of our car, asking if Carole was going to come home, so I must have been worried. But I’m also sure that my worry quickly gave way to delight when we got to the park. I went on rides, ate cotton candy, had a hot dog. I must have forgotten about my sister at some point, dismissed the argument in a naïve way, as simply a fight that would blow over in time and not as the terrible thing it actually was: an altercation that would leave my family forever broken.
I must have laughed.
• • •
I never found out the exact nature of the argument between my father and sister, or discovered, at least in those immediate years following her departure, what could have been so terribly bad that she would have wanted to run away forever. Indeed, my sister’s departure on that bright, sunny day was too painful a thing to talk about at all, and, when pressed, everyone in my family seems to have a different story surrounding those events, complicating the truth further and keeping it just out of reach.
In my family, we argue about the nature of truth and memory.
“You’ve got it wrong,” my brother once told me at one of those rare moments when we actually talked about our sister at all. “You weren’t five when she left home, you were seven,” he said. “And I pumped the bike tire for her; it had a flat.”
I cannot begin to explain how this one statement devastated me years after the fact, how it trapped me in a lie I didn’t even know I’d committed. What was most upsetting was the realization that came with my brother’s statement: I could not remember anything of those two lost years that I had suddenly recovered, that span of time between five and seven. Yet surely things must have happened. My sister and I must have joked around. She must have brushed through my always tangled hair. I must have accompanied her to the mall, played board games with her, bickered with her. Because I remember myself as younger than I actually was, I have effectively wiped out time and history with her; I have lost entire years I shared with my sister.
But why do I remember myself as younger? Was I particularly vulnerable at that moment, susceptible to the moods of the house? Is this why I remember myself as smaller? This error of memory leads to even more questions and doubts: Why, for example, do I remember that the floor was smooth and cool under me? Was it really so dim in the kitchen on what I also remember to be a sunny day? Most likely my mother or father had turned off the lights to help cool the rooms in those pre-air-conditioning days. But perhaps, too, I am adding details without realizing it, so that I can give this memory verisimilitude; the more detail there is, the easier the moment is to recall and the longer I am able to hold on to it. Perhaps I need to flesh in details to moments that, for me, are all I have left of my sister, ones that are inadequate at best. Or maybe this is the inherent problem of memory and of truth, that both exist only as fragments—mere moments—those isolated from the larger context and day. Who looks back over any remembered event, good or bad, and recalls every single detail?
I think that there is something in the brain that resists such fragmentation and that is the stuff of stories. What I can say are the following truths, these moments in a day that changed my life: My sister ran away from home and never came back. It happened on a very hot summer day. I was hiding under the table when she came through the door, crying. She rode off later on her bike, and I spent the rest of that day at an amusement park, playing with another girl my age.
Now, let’s dwell here again, but with a new context, a new problem: A young girl has gone missing at a local park. Her mother grieves. Her best friend feels responsible. Down the street, in another house, a family is in crisis.
To say that the idea of a girl who goes missing is inspired by my sister is a true enough statement, accurate in a sense. But to say that the little girl is also me would be equally true, that I went missing on that day as well. Using images, ones taken from my own experience— the bike, the lost child, the hot summer, the amusement park—I have, in Precious, reordered them and given them a new context and meaning, woven together entire pages—entire lies—around what are a few true moments, those details long held in my memory. As a writer of fiction, I do this all in an effort to recover what is lost, to breathe life into something that is gone forever from view.