Crash Course by Robin Black

Author:Robin Black
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938126925
Publisher: Engine Books
Published: 2016-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

Varieties of Fiction

When my then-fourteen-year-old daughter asked if she could read my newly published collection of stories, I hesitated, because of her language-based disabilities. Several of the pieces involve parents struggling with their sorrow over their disabled children’s challenges, struggling to adjust. Though not autobiographical, these accounts are echoes of my own experiences, and my first impulse was to protect her from reading that. But she was in a phase of feeling keenly that we had babied her for her entire life, of accusing us of defining her by what she cannot do. And she campaigned hard. So, after that initial hesitation, I gave her a copy of her own.

She carried it from room to room for several days while I stood at the ready, prepared to have whatever conversation seemed necessary. She sat with it, held it open now and then, and turned the pages—though not entirely convincingly. And gradually, I realized that there might be more pretending than actual reading going on, that it wasn’t the content that would upset her, but her inability to penetrate the words.

“You don’t have to read that, you know,” I said, as I watched her try.

“I know,” she said.

“Those stories can be hard to understand. Even for grown-ups.”

“I know,” she said again, her gaze steady on the page, everything about her posture a plea that I let the subject go.

I sometimes picture all those words I write, the letters, the punctuation marks, the ink itself, as a curtain of thick, black lace, through which my daughter cannot see. And at such moments, I hate the work that gives me so much pleasure, hate myself for thickening that curtain, for bolstering her sense that there is something very beautiful beyond her view.

For days it seemed as though every time I walked into the room, she picked up the book. For days, I could sense in these actions, in her body, in a kind of nervous force field surrounding her, that she didn’t trust me not to pin her down on what she had—or hadn’t—read. And she wasn’t wrong to be concerned. For years, I have thought of denial as harmful, as weak. Many writers do. We view ourselves as truth-tellers and find virtue in that role. My daughter knows me well.

But then, the book disappeared into her room. “I loved your stories,” she told me soon after that. “They’re really good.”

Once upon a time, I would have insisted it was healthiest to pierce whatever pretense might be at work. But even I have gradually come to understand what life has forced my child to grasp from early on, that it is a luxury to insist on blunt honesty as always best, a luxury to be granted an existence in which denial’s softening mercies are not necessary now and then.

“Thank you,” I said. “That means a great deal to me.”

Encouraging a lie? Perhaps. Or maybe just acknowledging that there are fictions far more important than my own.

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