All life stories through the mouth of the storyteller can fall quickly into the well worn tropes of ancient myths and legends. One only has to compare them with the spiteful, jealous vengeful way the Greek Pantheon behave. These personal tales drawn from life may still remain true to the person. the place or the time, even in the very moment that a narrative drifts into being light fingered with the facts, or run off to get completely divorced. This was never more true than of family stories, oft repeated and equally exaggerated and embellished in many a communal retelling.
Over years and lifetimes these repetitions gradually turn their face away from verisimilitude in order to relish the heightened melodrama of it all. The remnants of old grievances, revenge, soured loves and shattered dreams, live on in the family tales of self-righteous stances, the monstrous affronts, of the many personal mistakes redrawn as loosing the noble battle with fate. Its them against the world where the world always won, thwarting any hope of who they could become. History is hard on everyone's legacy because it is knowingly negligent and forgetful, leaving out anything inconvenient or off message.
When I look back at my own life stories, and they are definitely plural, I present them as if they are situated in a finely wrought stage play, framed within a proscenium arch with all exits and entrances clearly marked. I'm well aware of the plot holes, the deliberately misremembered bits because they make living with the shame of an event a teeny bit easier, or the once blind determination in my youth to turn wish fulfillment into a career strategy. For stories to have impact its all about the artifice and staging, the telling detail, a look, a small word out of place, a kind gesture, the much treasured meaningful memento left on the mantelpiece. For these were just so them
Any family is a nest of broken eggs, you have to be careful how, and even if you should, reassemble the fragments of shells you know of. Even as I turn towards the retelling of the stories associated with members of my family, its impossible to keep subjective feelings at bay. It feels strange to find myself knowingly taking on the mantle of the classic unreliable narrator of family fictions, traducing reputations, installing halos, spreading half remembered untruths, or even full untruths, based on only the merest hint from the Chinese whisperers in my own memory.
At times remembering them comes as a small madly flapping bird flys past your bedroom window. It catches the sleepy eyed corner of your attention where daydreams coalesce with memory. You find your imagination suddenly refleshes a person, maybe long gone, whom you haven't thought of in a long long while. In the flurry and bustle of your daily life your focus can be so head down absorbing the cracks in the pavement of the present moment, then up pops to mind this personality from the past At which the heart breaks open a magnum bottle of sentiment and we luxuriate in the brief bubbly froth of recollection.
Images seem to be nothing without their emotional background and the grand arc of the story that accompanies them. How we paint in words our family portraits, will always be riddled with the faults and factual inaccuracies that memory is prone to, yet still hold true to what remains of them in us. Its as though a perfume lingers on in a room, you can never quite place where on earth you smelt it first, but you recognise it nonetheless. It is them.
This occasional series of essays, Family Fragments, will contain contain short largely fictionalised portrait stories of individuals (all now deceased ) within the three generations of my family that I have known.
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