Later that week I realized that I had had a "BLINK" moment, because The Smoking Gun (a website that regularly posts legal documents, arrest records, and police mugshots with the intent to bring to public light information that is damning, shocking, outrageous, or amazing, yet also somewhat obscure or unreported by more mainstream media sources) exposed James Fry's best-selling nonfiction memoir as being "filled with fabrications, falsehoods, other fakery." After learning my suspicions about Fry's books were at very least embellished truths or at worst shameless fiction, I quickly removed the books from my "Recommends" list on this blog.
A storyteller is a person who invites others to enter into the experience of a story. Barbara Brown Taylor's latest book, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith does just that. Unlike the James Fry books mentioned above, her words about truth telling, public and private give you a window into both. Taylor shares her story of leaving a 15-year career as an Episcopal priest. Her honesty is striking and at times her descriptions are comparable to other great writers like Annie Dillard or Frederick Buechner. The following excerpts are from an address given at the Washington National Cathedral, June 7, 2006."If there are other memoir writers sitting here this evening, then you can take a little nap now, because you already know how it goes. The book you meant to write is not the book you write. You turn out to be even more narcissistic, melodramatic, and self-pitiful than you had reasonably feared. People who love you are willing to tell you this, which makes you even more narcissistic, melodramatic and et cetera. Finally, after you have written the book three times, ruthlessly wringing the necks of chapters you raised from baby chicks, you find that the writing heals itself as it heals you. The language runs clear at last. The flaws you can still see are not the ones in the writing but the ones in the mirror. You can look at yourself now with something closer to forgiveness than shame, so that a mere five weeks after you have sworn on everything holy that you will never, ever put yourself or your family through anything like this again, you are already thinking about the next book. Am I right?"
"One thing I discovered over the years was that the people who put themselves at risk like that—telling their story out loud, taking responsibility for their lives, making their private truth public—they were the ones who seemed best able to move on, while those who concealed their damage carried it around with them like an IV drip."
