To Tell the Truth

Last week I wrote about my beginnings as a children’s writer, what had brought me to the hard truths that often form the core of my stories. But I wrote about only one level of that beginning, my discovery that it was possible to write hard truths, even for a young audience, and to be published. That discovery excited and motivated me and sent me sailing into my first novel.What I didn’t talk about was why. And there is a very distinct why.I grew up at a time when children were routinely lied to. And my mother, I might add, was better at lying than most. Her lies weren’t meant to be harmful. She would, I am certain, have been shocked if anyone had suggested she was lying. Rather these mistruths were meant to “protect” us children. By the time I was grown, however, I realized that what we had been protected from was any truth that might create discomfort for the adult having to speak it. And that, probably more than any other single factor, formed the basis for my career as a children’s writer.I started off with one clear intention … to speak the truth, to always speak the truth, even when that truth was painful. Especially when that truth was painful, because those were the truths I’d been deprived of when I was a child.For better or for worse, my own children were not so deprived. My daughter did once tell me that I’d done a terrible thing in giving an honest answer to her three-year-old brother’s question about Santa Claus. Peter had asked whether Santa had really tiptoed into his room and put those things in his stocking or whether I had done it. My answering him honestly, she said, was the worst thing I had ever done as a parent. Peter, being two years older, had, of course, shared this information with her as soon as she could understand it, so she never had a chance to play the Santa game. (I figure if that was truly the worst thing I ever did—which I doubt—she got off pretty lightly.)But the “truth” door I passed through when I answered my son’s question is the same one I use to enter my stories. In the infamous Santa debunking, I responded to a direct question. I wouldn’t have chosen to spoil the Christmas magic for a three-year-old. But I am incapable of lying in answer to a direct question from anybody, especially from a child, and I’m incapable of writing stories that deceive or wriggle around hard truths.Honesty, for me, is holy. That’s because it wasn’t holy enough to my mother. Here’s an example: As a child, when I asked whether my family doctor didn’t used to have a nurse in his office who was also his wife, my mother said, “No.” The fact was that they had divorced. But my mother’s answer meant that the woman I remembered quite clearly had never existed! Divorce was unconscionable in my mother’s world, and I understand she was protecting me—and herself—against the knowledge that such terrible things could happen. But I was left bewildered and confused, mistrusting my own memory, and eventually when I learned the truth … furious.That, of course, is not the only example I could give of my mother’s lies, and she wasn’t the only source of the lies that I was subjected to as a child. Nor am I the only child ever lied to. The practice was ubiquitous in my parents’ generation, much of the lying involving a simple and powerful withholding of information.I’m not sure why I responded as strongly as I did, why I became such a determined truth teller when probably most others of my generation passed through similar experiences with a shrug. Perhaps it is, as I said, because my mother’s lies were a bit more outrageous than most. Or maybe because there is something at my core that I can only describe as sincere. Sincerity is what I’m good at, also sometimes its companion, naiveté. And both require truth telling.So my stories take on hard topics, and they present them in an honest and straight-forward way. It’s a strength of mine as a writer, at least it’s a strength if the truth is what you want from stories.Not everyone does.