Another rest day, another bag of dirty laundry taken furtively to the launderette so I can wait, discreetly knickerless, in a nearby cafe, drink coffee and write this blog.
I’d love to write more about all the things we hide from one another. Those are what fascinate me about humans I think; our hidden stories, all that we are holding while we present our best bright faces to the public, and the small ways that we show our real selves.
I’d like to talk about Raynor Winn, even though I’m far too slow and the wave of public scandal has crashed and gone to wash, the only remnants that I know of are that her next book is delayed by the publisher, her Salt path book remains a bestseller, and a portion of the public have had their trust destroyed. All the important people and those seeking positions as truth tellers have positioned and released their response statements, and mine comes too late to catch any virality whatsoever.
But I still think about it and had a lot of thoughts as the story unfolded. I have been walking thousands of miles and writing my own memoirs, I have an illness story, I have a messy past that I have chosen how much of to make public.
I know, to a much lesser degree than RW, how it is to have people feel that they know me based on my public writings and how I think to myself that they can’t really ever know more than part of me, because it’s all based on what I choose to tell. Even though I deliberately choose the path of the anti-hero, expressing vulnerability and failure over unblemished achievement, it’s all still based on what I choose to tell.
It’s strange, as Raynor was proved to have twisted her story, obscuring fraud and guilt to shift her role from criminal to victim, and as the internet shrieked about how let down they were, all the ways I tried to write about this situation came out in support of the writer.
Once you have become a public person nothing you have ever said or done can be trusted to stay in the past, or remain represented the way you meant it, rather than being held up to the light in a dozen different interpretations.
It’s got me thinking a lot about truth in memoir, the vulnerability of making public statements, the way that nobody is allowed fail, or be redeemed, or make mistakes.
I found it strange how suddenly everything became called into question, even whether they walked at all. They were compared with actual fraudsters Captain Tom’s family. But is the product they sold (a book) as fraudulent as setting up a charity and using funds from it to buy yourself a swimming pool?
Surely no fraudster ever thought that the simplest way to make millions was to write a book.
In this economy?
If people started to doubt my journey, how would I prove it? My statements about my life feel outlandish to me sometimes, when I look back at the last fifteen years. I kayaked the Danube, hitchhiked home for Christmas and found out I had cancer, then walked 3700 miles in response to that, well yeah it’s pretty crackers isn’t it. Did I really? Should I pull up my t-shirt and show you my abdominal scarring? My Instagram presents plenty of photos from Bosnia but can I prove I didn’t take a bus there? Well no actually. Unless you want to trace my journey across half a continent and find all the rural people who greeted me walking into their small villages, I don’t know how you’d go about proving or disproving my prowess. *
Truth is a malleable thing, whether we like that or not. We all want facts, we all want verifiable truths, and we live in a world where more and more is becoming fake – images, flavours, faces, reliability of consumer goods, politician’s promises, large corporation’s ecological changes or tax statements.
Finding out that a writer has manipulated the truth is a big scandal, a lie that has let us down, perhaps because the traditional purity of a storyteller remains more constant than the traditional purity of a president.
Post-truth society wins again, nothing is real and nothing can ever be pure again. But perhaps it’s an illusion that it ever could have been.
I struggle to talk about the complexity of messiness, the nuance needed to express myself is a bit beyond me, especially when I’m 1000 miles into a 1700 mile walk and trying to get a rough semblance of a blog down on my day off.
My washing has finished now, by the way, and I’m back in my temporary refugee, sprawled on the sofa, soon to give myself a foot bath.
My summary would be this:
To the general public: stop wanting your stories to be neat. To have a happy ending, to have an ending at all. Not everything ends up in a boy meets girls happy ever after. Humans are messy and so is life.
To capitalism: stop sensationalising everything. Nothing natural is in a state of constant growth. Why does the search for newness always have to be focused on a world first, a never seen before. Where is our comfort in repetition?
And I’ve also linked here a collection of pieces of writing that have caught my eye recently.
They talk about Raynor, and truth in memoir, and nuance, and ragged edges, and the way an attention deprived society cannot handle those things any more, whether by accident or by design.
You should definitely read all of these links, they are saying these things much better than I am capable of.
About Raynor Winn
About our dwindling attention spans
https://maalvika.substack.com/p/compression-culture-is-making-you
A review of my book and others in Folding Rock that highlights the beauty of messiness in art.
https://foldingrock.com/issue-002-review-essay-unspooling-the-narrative/
I’ve been learning more about the life of Marina Abramovic recently. She has a lot to say about public vulnerability and integrity.
Read her autobiography, that’s my next buy.
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There is so much more that I’m struggling to say, but my rest hours are up and I have to put this out as it is or dissolve it back into the soup of thoughts I haven’t had time to publish.
The end.
*(I have actually done all the things I claim to, just to absolutely be clear about that, as much as I deliberately muddy the waters for the sake of this blog story I don’t want to undermine my actual achievements.)
