The Story of You Isn't Really True
How your brain writes the fiction of you
This is You Are a Story, the place where I explore the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular quarterly ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses.
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Will Storr’s new book, A STORY IS A DEAL, is available now
She didn’t like to say it out loud, but Nicky was worried that her dad, Graham, had cancer. He’d lost three stone in four months. His diet had always been terrible, with his trifle and his chocolate éclairs and his cake. Now he was 73, and he’d been having these little episodes. His legs would suddenly feel weak. Sometimes he’d have to go back to bed. The good news was, he was still as lucid as ever, making his little jokes: “I think your mother’s trying to poison me,” he’d said a couple of weeks ago, when one of his Diet Cokes had tasted odd.
But there were other changes too. Every weekend, Nicky would make the 200-mile drive from her family home in Yorkshire to her parents’ bungalow in Sketty, a small community near Swansea in Wales. When she’d arrived, last Friday, the front garden had been a mess. His precious daffodils were all wilting and dying. He’d always been so meticulous about digging them out and storing their bulbs in the correct manner over the warmer months. Her mum, Marjorie, adored looking at the garden. She’d delight in pulling open the curtains on a summer morning and feeling the rush of all colours pouring in. All the hard work Dad put into his gardening was for her. And he’d seemed not right in himself. In a daze. Absent, somehow. “He’s not brilliant at the moment,” Marjorie had admitted. “We’re having tests done. I’ll let you know if there’s anything to worry about.”
Graham and Marjorie Glover had been first loves. She was a trainee hairdresser, living with her parents in a little terrace off the Brynymor Road in Swansea, and he’d been a clerk in an office. When they became sweethearts he’d walk her home, after a date, and they’d see the shadow of her waiting father in the window of her front door. They’d become engaged when Marjorie was eighteen, and had had one of those marriages you dream about. Whereas it was normal, then, for husbands and wives to socialise apart – him down the pub, her out with the girls – Graham and Marjorie would go to the pictures and the theatre together; in all their years as a couple, he’d never stopped buying her flowers and jewellery or leaving the house without kissing her goodbye. They’d just celebrated their fiftieth year as husband and wife and Nicky had treated them to tickets on the Orient Express. It was strange though: when she’d told her Mum about this dream-come-true gift, she’d noticed a kind of pause in her reaction.
That evening, after The Vicar of Dibley had finished, Marjorie had taken herself off to bed. Nicky and her Dad had listened to her go, above the sound of the Saturday night film beginning, and when he was sure his wife couldn’t hear, Graham leaned forward and said, “Things have gone very wrong. I think me and your Mum are going to have a divorce.”
It wasn’t possible. Her parents had this utterly perfect, happy little world. Divorce?
“I’ve seen your Mum in places she shouldn’t have been,” he said. “She’s been sneaking out. There’s another man. I’ve been following them.”
“I can’t believe you,” said Nicky.
It all came out in a torrent, then, as if it had been blocked up for months. Graham insisted that Marjorie had been having an affair with a local man, in his thirties. They were planning on selling the house and beginning a new life together. He’d even seen her scaling the high brick wall behind the hairdressers where she worked part-time, in order to be with him unnoticed.
“But Mum’s only five foot tall, Dad,” said Nicky. “She’s got arthritis.”
“No, no, you must listen,” he said. “He’s going to break in, in the middle of the night, and kill me. He’ll make it look like a burglary.”
The next day, when her Dad was out pottering in the garden, Nicky’s Mum asked her, “Was your dad talking to you last night?” she said. “What was he saying?”
“Oh Mum, I don’t want to be in the middle of this.”
She didn’t want to be in the middle of it, but she had to do something. At work on Monday, she’d request a couple of days off and come back to Sketty as soon as possible. She needed to figure out for herself what was going on.
The next morning, as she was driving up the M5 on her way back to Yorkshire, her phone rang. It was her father, his voice slow and distant.
“Are you alright, Dad?”
“Not too good,” he said.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ve taken some tablets. I’m ringing to say goodbye.”
Her stomach lurched.
“Where are you, Dad? Where’s Mum?”
“She’s dead.”