Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

I thought I saw what she was getting at. “You want me to write about the things I can’t seem to talk about.”

“You do seem to have an easier time articulating certain concerns on paper.”

“So I write this stuff all down and then I show you the entries.”

Jane shook her head. “No. I want you to think of them as stories that you write just for yourself, instead of for other people. And don’t make any rules for yourself about what goes in the journal except for the fact that you write in it every day. You can write about the day you’re having, or plan to have.

Story ideas, events from the past, philosophical chitchat, anything at all. Think of it as a way for you to have a dialogue with yourself, for yourself. No pressure, no expectations.”

‘just write for me.”

Jane nodded.

I laughed. “Sounds kind of like masturbating.”

Jane smiled in response, but I could see she didn’t agree with me at all. “There’s nothing unhealthy about doing something for yourself,” she said. “Our society has made it seem somehow shameful if we do anything for ourselves and that shouldn’t be the case. We deserve a little downtime to devote to ourselves.”

“Okay,” I said. “So I start a journal. And then what?”

“Then nothing,” Jane said. “I don’t want you to go into this with any sort of preconceptions. Just do it for yourself. Perhaps it will help you recall something that we can discuss in our sessions, perhaps not, but that’s not the reason you should be doing it. I want you to simply talk to yourself on paper. Give it a chance and see how it goes. We can discuss how it makes you feel after a few weeks.”

So that’s what I’m doing here—talking to myself, working on my autobiography, ha, ha—instead of telling stories to other people. But is it still autobiography, if I’m only writing to myself with no plans for publication? I don’t know what it is, or how it’s making me feel. For now I’m just going to do it.

* *

Rereading yesterday’s entry—yes, Dr. Jane, this makes two days in a row, whoopie-do got me thinking about autobiographies again, only from a different perspective, that of celebrities and their public’s seemingly insatiable need to know everything there is to know about them. I mean, People magazine didn’t get so popular because of its dedication to serious journalism.

I know Jane thinks I should be using these pages in a therapeutic manner, but I can see another use for these pages as well and that’s to set the future record straight. I don’t know why I care what people write about me after I’m dead, except that since I invest so much of my time telling the truth in my fiction, I’d hate to see someone play fast and loose with the pieces of my life. I don’t care what they might think of me; but I don’t want lies about my life used to invalidate the stories. My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn’t have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own.

So I realize that while I can use these pages as a journal the way Jane wants me to, I also have to use them to tell my own story. I’ll have to be completely honest. I’ll have to overcome my distaste of autobiography because of the fear of what they’ll say about me if I don’t write this.

The truth is, the success of The Angels of My First Death surprised no one as much as it did me.

But while my friends were all delighted with the newfound fame and freedom from monetary worries that the sales of that first book brought me, I could only think: what if when I die, my biographer goes to Margaret and gets her version of my early years, rather than the truth? Izzy and Alan and Jilly and the rest of them, they can fill in my Newford years, but going back to what brought me scurrying into the city—I’m the only one who can tell that story.

So that’s what brings me here: therapy and fear. But I’m going to compromise. I’ll tell the truth—I’ll always tell the truth in these pages—but I’ll do it in my own way.

* *

Here’s a weird thought: What if everyone only has so many words inside of them? Then sooner or later you’d run out of words, wouldn’t you? And you’d never know when it was going to happen because everybody would have a different allotment, it would be different for everyone—the way hair colour varies, or fingerprints. I could be in the middle of a story, and then run out of words and it’d never be finished. I could be using up the words I need for that story writing this.

Christ, I don’t even want to think about it.

* *

It wasn’t until I was fourteen that I discovered why my mother hated me. Like many unwanted children, I had a recurring fantasy that I was an orphan. That one day my real parents would arrive and take me away. But I never really believed it. I just figured, even as a child, that some people were born with good fortune and others got dealt the shit. You either played out your hand, or you folded. Then one day when I was fourteen ...

This is more intimidating than I thought it would be. Even with all these good intentions I’ve got and the past so far behind me, I still find it hard to write anything more than a few details. Fiction’s such an easier way to tell the truth. Anyway, here’s a big clue: I could only call her Margaret, not Mother.

I told all my friends I was an orphan, but here’s my real family tree: My father went to jail for molesting me when I was an infant and he was killed there by another inmate. I’d like to think it was because the other prisoners drew the line at having to do time with child-molesters, but the truth is he was a stoolie.

My mother committed suicide. Not because she loved my father and died of a broken heart. She just couldn’t deal with real life. Tell me about it.

Siblings? Not a one.

* *

Got up. Looked in the mirror after having a pee. Went back to bed. Don’t know if ever want to get up again. Is this the kind of thing you had in mind for me to write, Jane? I hope not, because it’s really starting to depress me and it doesn’t take much these days, let me tell you.

* *

Definitely a down day yesterday. Maybe I should try to find something happier to write about, like how from the first time I met Izzy, I felt we were knitted together, the way the eye knits a landscape, horizon to sky. I knew we would always be friends. Two weeks of being together with her and I wanted to be more than friends. I realized that I had fallen in love with her from day one, but I never once got up the courage to tell her. I hope I do before either of us dies. Maybe when we’re old and grey and nobody else could possibly want us—though I can’t see anybody ever not wanting Izzy. It’s not because she’s beautiful, which she is; it’s because she’s an angel, sent down from heaven to make us all a little more grateful about our time spent here on planet earth. We’re better people for having known her.

She’d die to hear me saying that. When it comes to modesty, she’s cornered the market. She was like that right from the start.

* *

Here’s something Izzy’s friend John once told me. He was passing it on as a story idea but I never have gotten around to using it yet. I never forgot it, though. We were having dinner together at the Dear Mouse Diner during that crazy period when Izzy was trying to put together her first show at The Green Man, both of us feeling a little lonely and left out of her life. I told him I’d been reading the Bible lately, mostly because I wanted to soak in the language, and how startled I was at just how many good stories there were in it.

“What about the ones they left out?” he asked.

“Like what?”

“Like how there wasn’t only a Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, but a Tree of Life as well, and who ate of its fruit, lived forever. That was why God expelled Adam and Eve—not because they had acquired knowledge, but that they might acquire both knowledge and immortality.”