The Memories We Carry When I was two years old, my family rented a beach house in the Outer Banks. It was terrible, or so I am told. The small, weathered house was temporarily home to my parents, my aunt and uncle, six children below the age of eight, and two dogs. The homeowners promised the house would be clean upon arrival; we soon learned clean is a rather subjective term. Sand fleas inhabited the couches and animal droppings decorated the floor. The adults went out and bought cleaning supplies and raided the place from top to bottom with disinfectant; after sanitizing everything, they carefully placed white sheets over each piece of furniture and the vacation continued as planned.
The home’s horrendous conditions did not deter my family from returning to the Outer Banks for another thirteen years. Though, we did not go back to that disgusting beach house. My family rented a larger, and
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He claims stories are often built on a foundation of truth, yet are carried “forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain” (O’Brien 158). Maybe my story is true; maybe my story is a lie. Maybe I embellished the story, embellished it until even I could not tell the truth from the lies. It does not matter if Catie and I snuck into that house or if, after eight years, we saw what we saw. All that matters is that readers feel that moment, share in our excitement, our triumph, when they hear that story. All that matters is that listeners are there, that they are our partners in crime, when they hear that story. Ultimately, it does not matter if the truth is true because, as O’Brien claims, “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (179). In other words, some stories may never have happened, but these stories can be emotionally true rather than factually