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The Unreliable Narrator
by Pam Mandel
Liv Fun: Vol 8 – Issue 1
I could not have taken the ferry from there — there is not, nor has there ever been, a ferry dock at that particular location. Not only that, the landscape is completely different. It is not the arrowhead-shaped flat bit of land that I remember; it would have been a rocky coastline instead. It’s like my memory has redrawn the story so it fits what I see now when I look at a map of the Sinai Peninsula — a triangle shape of land in the fork of the Red Sea.
I’m not lying, not in the literal sense of the word anyway. There’s no benefit to a lie. I just want to tell this story set in a geographically specific place that is, perhaps, easy for you to picture if you are the kind of person who likes maps, who knows them. When I unspool this memory for you, I only need you to know that I was in this place, and it looked a certain way. I don’t need you to think better or worse of me; perhaps my only goal is vanity. “You were where, when?” I might want you to ask, and I might want you to think me especially adventurous, which I did not feel at the time.
The editor told me how wrong I was; she was an expert on the geography of the region. “You could not have been there, and plus, it is far from flat.” She named the place it would have been, the place it still is, and I looked it up, and of course she was right, because she was working in the present and I was working from memory only.
Liv Fun
by Leisure Care
Spring 2019
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10 Truths & a Lie
by Nancy Gertz
I learned to play “Ten Truths and a Lie” at a writing retreat. We went around the room, each person slowly reading. Everyone voting. It was nearly impossible to separate the lie from the truths in all the lists. There were stories from the mountaintops of nirvana and horrible retellings from the pits of hell on earth.
The Unreliable Narrator
by Pam MandelI have spent the past year working on a memoir about some travel I did in the early ’80s. I have very little to go on. It’s like my memory has redrawn the story so it fits what I see now … I’m not lying, not in the literal sense of the word anyway.
Into the Great Unknown
by Dave Cuzzolina
If you are like many retirees, your decision to retire took considerable soul-searching and rigorous number-crunching. It was likely one of the hardest decisions of your life. Besides ensuring your emotional readiness, you needed to know you were ready financially.