I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person’s experience is not another’s.
It is the stories we tell ourselves that make up who we are. They may be the truth, or they may have been told so many times that they’ve become truth.
For my whole life, I believed that I was tall, dark skinned and dark haired due to a genetic anomaly. Inherited from some great uncle, or explained by the fact that we had two tall (albeit fair) cousins on my Dad’s side. We all joked on the regular that my Mom had had an illicit affair with the mailman. My brother and I look alike, and we are born four years apart, so it didn’t add to any doubt. I was asked regularly where I got my height, asked by strangers if I was Lebanese, and when I was travelling, I seemed to be a chameleon, fitting into the look of wherever I was. Spanish. Greek. Italian. Mexican. Middle Eastern.