On Memory And Honesty And The Line Between Fiction And Non-Fiction

“In the book, I tell a story about the day that my father brought home the news that he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was a senior in high school, a month shy of graduating; he was given two months to live. As you’d imagine, my family was fairly devastated, and my mother asked me to drive to the video store to rent a couple movies to get our minds off the news — comedies, my father suggested; he wanted to laugh. Operating in what I guess was a state of shock, I made a poor choice at the video store. I’d picked up my girlfriend on the way home, and on our way into the house, she asked what I’d rented and I told her and she stopped me cold — and I’ll never forget the feeling of standing in our carport, looking down at the VHS box in my hand, and seeing the cover of Terms of Endearment. It was a movie my dad and I had never seen, one we’d been wanting to see before he’d gotten sick. But we knew what it was about. Everybody knew what it was about — Debra Winger had been nominated for every award in the world for her performance of a woman who dies of cancer. I remember standing there at the door to my house, my feet on the green Astroturf that carpeted the step, and thinking to myself, How could you be so stupid? And opening the door and calling my mom over discretely, to show her the box, and telling her I had to go back to the store, that I had made a terrible mistake, and shaking my head as I closed the door again, backing away. It’s something that has stayed with me since. For twenty-five years now, I’ve been playing that moment over in my head. I’ve told the story to friends, talked about it with my family, and like I said, I wrote it into my book, in a chapter headed Dear Mom, Sorry for Choosing Terms of Endearment When You Asked Me To Go Out And Rent Some Movies for Our Family to Watch To Get Our Minds Off the Fact That Dad Had Been Diagnosed With Cancer. It’s very compelling, right? How emotional trauma can affect one’s thinking. The thing is, though, that didn’t happen. Not exactly.”
 — In case you are not yet sick of me (related: I am starting to get sick of me), I wrote an essay for the Daily Beast about the writing of an essay that ran here at the Awl a couple weeks ago

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