He thought that I thought...

One of the things I've been reading while I've been here (still in Oregon) is Alison Bechdel's astonishing memoir about growing up, called Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. It's a remarkable book -- she grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania with a closeted gay father who was a high school English teacher and ran a funeral home. (The "Fun Home" of the title). I've been such a fan for so long of DTWOF, and this graphic novel form for her own life just takes her work to a whole new level.

At a pivotal point in the book -- when she's come out to her parents and this has provoked a shift in her father's silence about his own identity -- she describes a letter from him to her at college: "He thought that I thought that he was a queer. Whereas he knew that I knew that he knew that I was too."

I think this is a remarkable way to describe all of the contexts that go into how we make meaning, identity, stories together. We figure out what we think the other person's reality is and we wrap our responses into that.

The book is a tremendous read on its own -- funny and reflective and insightful and tragic and sad -- and beautifully art directed -- and it's also a fractal for the musing I've been doing about identity and storytelling since I've been here. I've been thinking a lot about the point and shape of our narratives, in all sorts of ways.... from a conversation about United 93 where someone said "I know the story, I don't know why I need to see this," to rewatching Eternal Sunshine, which so brilliantly floats us on how our stories, relationships always shape who we are, to thinking about the pen I hold now in front of blank paper, wondering which hooks of my past will become the themes I build my future plots on.

I read an interview with Bechdel where the writer -- inevitably -- compared her childhood experiences to Six Feet Under. She said she'd only seen one or two episodes, and she'd often wondered if Alan Ball had ever overheard her talking in a coffee shop, because the family funeral home/closeted gay funeral director premise seemed too uncanny. Of course, the bare premise is the same -- but the fullness of each version of that premise is completely different. And that, I think, is the mystery and intensity of lived narrative... that we can have such similar bones and yet be so brilliantly different... that the many many many bifurcation points we face in all of our day to day decisions create such difference, different possibilities, different realities.

It's possible to make the point that making a movie like United 93 is a way of not rendering a story "untellable" -- an important factor for any culture... that's true, I think... and I actually thought the true accomplishment of that film was the way it didn't "other" the terrorists (in fact, drew parallels to the other passengers), and the way it played the seizing of the plane by the passengers not as heroic but as a simple act of self-preservation. There were no grandiose statements about saving the lives of anyone on the ground, just a flimsy hope that they might as well try to save their own lives. Those two simple reframes of some of the "assumptions" about the story that tend to mark the way the story gets publicly told -- that the terrorists are "other than" us (scary shoe-bomber chaotic people), that the passengers were "heroes" -- alone make the movie an achievement.

Bechdel's book is that same kind of achievement -- a powerfully insightful tracing of how she came to understand "truth" and reliability, and in a way, to be at peace with the acknowledgement that each of our truths is ours alone, shifting even in the moment as we name it to ourselves. What I build into this is that our moments of shared "agreement" on a truth are the mystery and wonder of how we live together and twine ourselves into each other; the willingness to hold each other's truth as possible even when we don't share it is the art and work of living.