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A review by notoriousagk
Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell by Ellen Douglas
3.0
The concept was interesting; an author goes public with the "truths" behind the novels she's written, now that she's outlived all the family and other members of the community who might object to her revealing the stories she's picked up from them. Unfortunately, her focus on strict truth-telling limits her story-telling, since most of the "truths" she's telling are fragmentary by their very nature--for instance, her grandfather's suicide, a rarely-discussed family secret about which she never did learn the details, which tends to be the case with rarely-discussed family secrets. With so little to go on, it's difficult to find this "truth" compelling.
Perhaps the only place her absolute refusal to fudge the details did work was her final story, "On Second Creek," where her attempts to uncover the history behind the punishment of 30 slaves murdered for plotting an insurrection by a group of men which included her own ancestors is largely fruitless. In that story only, the silence of the historical record, and her inability to uncover the voices of those involved--and particularly the voices of the slaughtered men--resonates. Her framing of her mother's visceral horror at the lynching of a free black man in the 20s against her family's unquestioning admiration of their forebears, some of whom were likely complicit in something even worse, is probably the most pointed and poignant moment in the whole memoir.
Perhaps the only place her absolute refusal to fudge the details did work was her final story, "On Second Creek," where her attempts to uncover the history behind the punishment of 30 slaves murdered for plotting an insurrection by a group of men which included her own ancestors is largely fruitless. In that story only, the silence of the historical record, and her inability to uncover the voices of those involved--and particularly the voices of the slaughtered men--resonates. Her framing of her mother's visceral horror at the lynching of a free black man in the 20s against her family's unquestioning admiration of their forebears, some of whom were likely complicit in something even worse, is probably the most pointed and poignant moment in the whole memoir.