Stories and Truth
8/8/09 11:59![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madrobinsAlgis Budrys, teaching at Clarion, used to say that people read fiction as a way of making sense of the world, or preparing themselves for experiences they might have: his example was of teenaged girls reading Romeo and Juliet as a way of experiencing a first love gone seriously wrong. Almost thirty years later, I think he had a point. As I was reading The New York Times this morning I started thinking about writing as my way of making sense of the world, because there was a front-page piece on Diane Schuler, mother of two, working woman, wife, who killed herself and seven others on the Taconic Parkway two weeks ago.
The Taconic is a twisty divided parkway that extends from Westchester northward. When I was a kid we drove it every weekend on our way to Massachusetts. In most places it's two lanes in either direction, and even when I'm on my game I rarely drive at the speed limit on it because it's not built that way. Schuler, coming back from a camping trip with her two children plus three nieces, got on the road going the wrong way and drove almost two miles before plowing into an SUV and killing herself, four of the five kids in her vehicle, and three men in the SUV.
She was drunk. According to the toxicology reports released, her blood alcohol level was more than twice the limit for intoxication. There was also marijuana in her system. And most grisly of all, there were phone calls from the girls in the car to their father, saying "something's wrong with Aunt Diane; she can't see right, and she's slurring." I almost can't get any farther, just imagining the terror of the children in that car.
Schuler's husband, a public safety officer, says she was not an alcoholic. It's easy to say he was in denial, or that he's lying, but I suspect he's telling the truth as far as he knows it: people at the McDonalds where she stopped with the kids that morning say she did not appear impaired in any way. And I know from experience that some alcoholics are very very good at passing for sober: my brother didn't realize my mother was drinking until I went off to college--the combination of his obliviousness, my mother's skill at passing, and me standing between the two of them made that possible.
I don't know what anyone knew before the event, or what was in Diane Schuler's mind. I do know that when I read this article I immediately saw a story in my head, and in my head the woman driving that minivan was very angry, had been angry for a long time, perhaps for no reason that anyone in her life would recognize. In my story, crashing her van into that SUV wasn't about being drunk, except that the alcohol licensed her to express her fury in a way she could never have done, sober. And then I realized that the reason I went to anger (rather than hopelessness or confusion or sadness) is that that was the form my mother's alcoholism took, and the reason that I was writing the story in my head was that it's a way of writing my mother's story at a remove that is safe for me. That doesn't make my version of the story true.
I write to understand. It doesn't always work. Whatever stories will be told about Diane Schuler, we will never know her truth. We are left to make our own.
The Taconic is a twisty divided parkway that extends from Westchester northward. When I was a kid we drove it every weekend on our way to Massachusetts. In most places it's two lanes in either direction, and even when I'm on my game I rarely drive at the speed limit on it because it's not built that way. Schuler, coming back from a camping trip with her two children plus three nieces, got on the road going the wrong way and drove almost two miles before plowing into an SUV and killing herself, four of the five kids in her vehicle, and three men in the SUV.
She was drunk. According to the toxicology reports released, her blood alcohol level was more than twice the limit for intoxication. There was also marijuana in her system. And most grisly of all, there were phone calls from the girls in the car to their father, saying "something's wrong with Aunt Diane; she can't see right, and she's slurring." I almost can't get any farther, just imagining the terror of the children in that car.
Schuler's husband, a public safety officer, says she was not an alcoholic. It's easy to say he was in denial, or that he's lying, but I suspect he's telling the truth as far as he knows it: people at the McDonalds where she stopped with the kids that morning say she did not appear impaired in any way. And I know from experience that some alcoholics are very very good at passing for sober: my brother didn't realize my mother was drinking until I went off to college--the combination of his obliviousness, my mother's skill at passing, and me standing between the two of them made that possible.
I don't know what anyone knew before the event, or what was in Diane Schuler's mind. I do know that when I read this article I immediately saw a story in my head, and in my head the woman driving that minivan was very angry, had been angry for a long time, perhaps for no reason that anyone in her life would recognize. In my story, crashing her van into that SUV wasn't about being drunk, except that the alcohol licensed her to express her fury in a way she could never have done, sober. And then I realized that the reason I went to anger (rather than hopelessness or confusion or sadness) is that that was the form my mother's alcoholism took, and the reason that I was writing the story in my head was that it's a way of writing my mother's story at a remove that is safe for me. That doesn't make my version of the story true.
I write to understand. It doesn't always work. Whatever stories will be told about Diane Schuler, we will never know her truth. We are left to make our own.