All in the Edit
Another more thought-provoking, spoiler-free moment from Followers by Megan Angelo.
On page 288, a character receives a letter where the sender tries to explain why she did what she did. In other words, she did something horrible.
Think Jean Valjean in Les Misérables: Stealing is wrong. But the character adds context. In Les Misérables, we empathize with Jean Valjean. Sure, he did something wrong, but he only did it because he was starving. If we don’t feel anything, we’re as bad as Javert, who is held up as the antagonist. The “because” becomes just as important as the action, softening the edges.
Back to Followers, the writer of the letter has done something awful, but she’s trying to give context. (Telling you what she did would be a major spoiler. I want to talk about it, but I’ll wait a little while before I write it and mark that post as clearly containing a spoiler.)
The letter states:
There’s one thing I get that you never have. There aren’t actually heroes or victims or villains. Not in our story, and probably not in anyone else’s. I know you know this deep down: it’s all in the edit.
I am clearly the protagonist in my story. I may do terrible things, but that’s because I’m loveably flawed. Other people do terrible things, and my brain paints them as fully evil. I do something wrong, and there’s a “because.” Someone else does something wrong, and the only explanation is that they’re malicious. We are quick to forgive our friends. We are quick to find fault with our enemies… even if our enemies are politicians on Twitter or that annoying person who sends 14 insipid posts per day on the neighbour listserv, clogging your inbox.
It comes down to how we edit the situation; the story we tell ourselves.
3 comments
Oh, this is so very true. I’ve got one of those situations in my own life where I tend to paint my own actions as very understandable and this other individual’s as terrible. It’s been a long process of trying to undo the mindset to at least not immediately jump to the worst possible motivation whenever something happens that this person is even peripherally involved in. I really like the way this entry sort of explains that phenomenon – a good way of giving myself some perspective.
So true. I have thought of this often with respect to a family-member-by-marriage with whom I “share” a mutual dislike: to hear me tell the story, the reason we don’t get along is that she is a terrible, flawed human being. I’m sure her friends, who hear only her version of events, think the same thing about me.
So fascinating, the idea of perspective and the story. I love books in which the same story is told through different lenses. Is that a Rashomon thing? That word comes to mind, I think because of an old thirtysomething episode with the same premise.
Anyway, sometimes in stressful parenting moments (or during any conflict, really) I try to imagine how the other person would be narrating this scene. It helps me to try to see from the other perspective and assume their best intent. After all, as you say, we are all the hero (flawed, perhaps) of our own stories.
I like to try to find the omniscient point of view in a lot of situations, just out of curiosity.
I’ve put this book into my library queue.