SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 34
The cinematic language here highlights that these scenes—like all long-held and oftenrecalled moments—have been trimmed and polished into something that is more like a final
cut than raw footage.
In another essay, “Tell Me It’s Raining,” I take this awareness a step further by using the
image of a doubly exposed photograph to describe moments where I’ve consciously changed
details in my experiences to portray a brave persona. The essay centers around a humiliating
sexual experience that, in the moment, I was too ashamed to address. Instead of confronting
the bad behavior, I simply waited until the man fell asleep and snuck out. But I didn’t want to
admit that to my friends, so I invented an alternative ending. In the essay, I share both what
really happened —"All I wanted was escape, but the more my mind screamed GET OUT
the more pliant I became” and the alternate ending I invented. I only changed one detail. “I
ran…I leapt from the shower, shampoo still in my hair, dragged clothes over my wet skin,
and jumped into a cab.”8
By including both versions, I acknowledge the shame that often accompanies trauma
responses and explore how lying can be self-protection and even a step toward healing, a way
of imagining yourself into new behaviors. In the final paragraph of that same essay, I call
attention to the project of persona creation and raise the question of whether it is valuable to
share truths that are untidy and uninspiring. I write:
Maybe I’m a liar, or maybe I’m just creative. The stories are better the way I usually
tell them. They follow the rules of plot: inciting incident, climax, resolution. What
use is a story where the same conflict happens over and over, where the protagonist
doesn’t change, or learn, or act? What if there is no end, only endless repetition?
What if the only change I make is to move as far as I can from the province of men?
What if all that is said is the fixed, stable truth?9
Ending the piece with these questions, I contrast the lived experience of growth (messy, slow,
nonlinear) with the way it is typically depicted in stories (straightforward, sudden, consistent).
I construct a persona who is brave but self-conscious, a liar full of hope and doubt.
In other creative mediums, the audience is intuitively aware of the way the medium
distorts and edits experience. A song or a painting may be inspired by real events, but it
is clearly a carefully shaped telling of those events. When we are reading about someone’s
memories, it can be easy to forget that creative nonfiction is a medium at all. Telling ourselves
stories about our lives is how we communicate internally with ourselves. The power of creative
nonfiction is that it’s a medium of intimacy that easily conveys interiority. As Patricia Hampl
says in I Could Tell You Stories, “memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to ‘tell a
story.’ They want to tell it all—the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself.”10
If Chappell Roan’s popularity is any indication, it seems that people are hungry for
complexity, for personas that are less polished and more dimensional. We may not be able
to bring every aspect of ourselves into every piece we write, but it’s worth considering if
we can whittle away a little less, if more parts of us may be relevant to the story than we
initially considered. We can construct personas with overdrawn eyebrows and ill-fitting thrift
store finds, versions of ourselves that acknowledge our pasts, our poor coping strategies, our
backsteps and missteps alongside our growth. We can, like Chappell Roan, tell stories of
Laura M. Martin, “Tell Me It’s Raining,” Blue Earth Review, no. (2023), 40.
Martin, “Tell Me,” 41, 42.
10
Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory (New York, NY: W.W. Norton,
2000), 18.
8
9
11
