28 July 2018
As a child, I was a big liar; I told all kinds of lies. I lied in order to seem better than I was. I lied to boast about things I would like to have done, but hadn’t. I often got into real trouble, because I was consistent with my lies, confessing sins that I had committed only in a lie. I told anguished lies—painful to remember—improvised in a hurry to avoid some act of violence, usually on the part of boys.
But the lies that I liked best—and I told quite a number of them—served absolutely no purpose. I put a lot into them and did all I could to make them seem like things that had really happened. They seemed so true that even I, as I was speaking, had the impression they weren’t lies. Or maybe it’s the opposite: I would tell lies without considering them lies, so they gave a stronger appearance of truth.
That kind of lie belongs to the happy side of my childhood. I was very successful with my peers, who were beguiled by my stories; they believed me and would have listened to me for ever. But then, sometimes, someone would say: it’s too good, it can’t really have happened. And then I was a little ashamed; I began to swear to the truth of the story, and at the same time I was sorry. I became anxious, I felt that the game was being spoiled. What should I do? Make the lies repellent? But what pleasure would there be in telling them, if I made them boring, incoherent?
Maybe it was because of those criticisms that, around the age of twelve, I decided not to lie any more. Perhaps I simply wanted to become adult, and telling lies seemed childish. So, as I’ve done often in my life, overnight I imposed on myself a fierce discipline, and I stopped telling lies. To compensate, I became a good oral narrator of all kinds of events. I recounted my dreams and nightmares, making an effort to be extremely faithful. I summarised novels and films for my friends, and the summaries were very detailed. Sometimes, too, I recounted things that had really happened to me—careful, however, not to adjust them to make them flow better, or in a more engaging way.
Yet for years I felt nostalgia for the long, cogent and gratuitous lies of the child: I had the impression that they were truer than the truth. That nostalgia is probably what later led me to give a narrative style to the diaries I kept, and started me writing novels, where I could explore the possibilities of the particular type of lie that is the story.
Anyway, novels or not, the nostalgia remains. I love children who tell lies for no reason—I immediately recognise the pleasure. And I also recognise the anguish—the anguish when children lie to protect themselves—because the world is full of traps and humiliations, and the lie can sometimes give us a little respite.