Never Let the Truth Stand in the Way of a Good Story: A Work for Three Voices

Abstract

y father always said, Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story. It was certainly a maxim he took to heart. In his world I was a six-foot-five-inch high school basketball dynamo certain to be named to the All-Conference Team. He was a veteran of the 101st Airborne and had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day with General John Gavin. And when I married he told people my wife was descended from ancient Irish nobility. (Closer to reality I was a six-foot benchwarmer who got cut from the team my senior year because of a combination of shoddy ball-handling skills and a poorly hidden contempt for the coach. My wife's lineage is certainly Irish, but can claim only rural poverty as her Hibernian heritage. And my father was in the Army in the Second World War and did land at Omaha Beach, as a sergeant in the finance division a month after D-Day.) It used to make me furious when my father would embellish his stories to make them better. That is not what happened, I would fume. What is wrong with just telling the truth? I couldn't understand why he would feel compelled to lie. After all, he had no tolerance for my lying. When I went through a stage at about age ten of making up one whopper after another, both to entertain and to get out of trouble, his response was strict and inflexible: I must not lie; honorable men tell the truth. If I questioned him about this seeming inconsistency-for he was an honorable and compassionate man-he would smile at me, repeat his maxim about good stories, and leave me to rage inside at how my life was being misrepresented to others.