Your Self-Story Is a Lie

In a 2009 interview, filmmaker Werner Herzog argued that his documentary films resemble something more like fiction: “I stage them. And I stylize them. I’m not the kind of cinema verite who postulates you should be unobtrusive. I will be present.”

This was a surprising statement given that documentary films, with their reliance on video footage, perhaps claim more than any other artistic medium to have the most fidelity to the truth. Seeing is believing, after all. Indeed, the cinema verite style, known for its “fly on the wall” approach, has filmmakers trying their darndest to remove themselves from the scene to capture the "pure truth" of a moment.

But even if that filmmaker succeeds, most documentaries have an 80-to-1 footage-to-final cut ratio (Rabinger, 2009). That is, for every 80 hours of film, only one hour ends up in the actual film.

It is in this editing process—curating, sorting, ordering—that Herzog likens himself to “the hornet that goes in and stings.” Because narrativization always requires paring down, some fictionalization is inevitable, even if all the source material is true.

In our quest for meaning-making, humans go through a similar process of storying—arguably making us closer to half-truths than fully factual beings.

We Are Surrounded by Stories

In his excellent TED talk, author Noah Yuval Harari unpacks how we are the only species that imposes a subjective worldview over an objective reality. For a chimp, a banana will always be a banana. But for a human, that banana can be a nostalgic remembrance of youth—reminding them, for example, of the album art for The Velvet Underground & Nico. To that same chimp, a twenty-dollar bill has no value. But to a human, that paper can purchase goods in a dynamic economy.

Money, religion, governments—these are all stories that we have collectively bought into. Our world, our country, our state, our town, our school or job, our family—we are surrounded by constellations of stories.

These many narrative valences can easily overwhelm us. In his book, The Sense of an Ending (2000), the literary theorist Frank Kermode describes this phenomenon: “The organism finds itself in a world of contradictory sensations, it is exposed to the assaults of a hostile world, and to preserve itself is forced to seek every possible means of assistance.” The “assistance” here is narrative, which provides us with the “mental structures” to impose order onto chaos.

In other words, narrative structure allows us to curate and sort the raw, formless data of reality. If documentaries are more like fictionalizations, are we then—in that we curate, cut, sort, order, and serialize the raw data of reality—more like fictions as well? I would argue that the answer is yes.

The messy practice of capturing "reality"

Source: Pexels / Pixabay (CCO)

“The sense of meaning and continuity that is achieved through the storying of experience is gained at a price,” writes Michael White (1990), the founder of narrative therapy. The “price” White speaks of is objective truth.

Leveraging Our Fictions for a Better Life

What are the implications of this? And how can we live a better life from this fact? A debate in the literary world of creative nonfiction is a good place to start.

Spend any time with professors of creative writing and you’ll soon hear them complain that students in fiction class are actually writing thinly-veiled memoirs while students in nonfiction class are actually writing fiction. This observation proves true in the publishing world as well. Why is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried categorized as fiction over memoir when he did in fact fight in the Vietnam War? Why is Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)—which opens with the caveat “this is not, actually, a work of pure nonfiction. Many parts have been fictionalized in varying degrees, for various purposes”—sold as nonfiction?

Once interrogated, the value of genres can quickly fall away. "Just because something never happened doesn’t mean it isn’t true" has become a kind of koan for writers who wish to sidestep the debate over truth in genre. What these writers seem to have settled on is that what matters most is fidelity to the emotional truth of the story. If, in your memoir, you need to invent a scene or two to get closer to the emotional truth as you experienced it, then that’s not only acceptable but encouraged.

How can we apply this lesson of emotional truth to our own lives?

This question is complicated by the fact that memory is notoriously flimsy. Researchers can implant false memories into willing subjects (see Elizabeth Loftus' Lost in the Mall technique). The seemingly most durable memories we have—flashbulb memories, a term coined after the world witnessed JFK’s assassination, when researchers found years later that everyone could vividly recall where they were when they heard the news—can change over time into fictions.

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And memories in general are subject to a phenomenon known as memory conformity, which purports that memory is subject to a kind of social contagion. When our stories can only be as factual as the memories that shape them, it’s hard to imagine achieving a self-story claiming absolute truth even if you "remember" all the story’s constitutive parts.

Identity is something you actively create, not something given to you.

Source: Pixabay / Pexels

The Role of Narrative Therapy

I'm not arguing that you're essentially lying to yourself because I want to discourage you. Rather, it’s important to maintain a constructivist approach to your sense of self—understand that you are not a pre-written story but an agent who can write and rewrite your story each day.

Narrative therapists differentiate between an internal state understanding of self—describing an essential self that is innate and fixed, found at the very core of the person’s identity—from intentional state understanding, which casts people as active storytellers and meaning-makers in their identity. Identity in intentional state understanding is the real-time manifestation of one’s values being acted out in the world.

In his book The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon (2015) beautifully describes these understandings of self: “There is no essential self that lies pure as a vein of gold under the chaos of experience and chemistry. Anything can be changed, and we must understand the human organism as a sequence of selves that succumb to or choose one another.”

This notion does cut against the Western notion of identity. In a consumerist, status-obsessed culture, we are defined by what we do and what we own. Imagine if at your next cocktail party you asked a stranger what they value, not what they do.