246. Circling the Truth - Erica Berry
John Bisbee, “Only Nails, Always Different” (2015)
Whereas some kids inflated truth to make themselves sound better, I was most comfortable in a coda of self-deprecation. I exaggerated to make my life more absurd.
I learned the pleasures of exaggeration as a tween. Opening my mouth at the dinner table, I’d spin a story about something I had encountered at school. I was eager to make my family laugh. My parents had recently begun working together to start a business, and the specter of stressful days often joined us at the table. Reality, I was learning, was hard. A good story couldn’t fix it, but it might offer something palliative—a damp rag on a hot day.
Whereas some kids inflated truth to make themselves sound better, I was most comfortable in a coda of self-deprecation. I exaggerated to make my life more absurd. If in real life I tripped down a few steps, in my stories, I fell down a whole flight. Will you believe me if I say the exaggerations were unintentional? I never premeditated. All day I’d collect moments—things seen or done—then, elbows on the table, empty my pockets. Every now and then, encouraged by crinkled brows and toothy grins, my lived experience would tip into something else.
I never invented new scenarios, just tweaked and buffed the ones I had. I felt less like a fabricator than a person at a mixing board, adjusting the dials, trying to help the listener along. I now remember less what I exaggerated then how it felt when the untruth slipped from my lips: a dog running through a swinging door. By the time I clocked its escape, it was already too late.
Today, recalling those exaggerations conjures a strange mixture of shame and pride. Sure, I was falling in love with storytelling, but I was also convincing myself that my own truth was not enough. In the nearly two decades since, I have made my career as a writer of fact. My first book lives on the “nonfiction” shelf, a word defined only by its insistence on the anti-lie. To exaggerate is to suggest that without embellishment, the raw material of our lives is too dull. My work today is compelled by a desire to prove that instinct wrong.
I think of my former sculpture professor, a man whose only material is nails. For decades he has hammered and bent and welded them, uncovering new possibilities for their form. Constraint, he always told us, was the seed of creativity. I love reading fiction, just like I love playing out alternate versions of my life, but at least for now, as a writer, I relish the nails of fact. I have felt myself transformed when, after a day of circling the truth, some shard of life glints back at me, anew.
- Erica Berry
