The Narrative*
*A post inspired by The Pain You Seek
If there is one thing that has left an impression on me the past several years, perhaps in more desperate circumstances than I ever considered before, is that we live in a world of competing narratives. Lately, there has been no more immediate proof that narratives, on the national and international stage, are driving forces of the truth—not the truth of history that is shaped and sanitized in textbooks, but the truth that we see on the TV news or in our feeds every day, right now.
One narrative does not just want to prevail, but it wants to wipe out the counternarratives, render them as false or label them as “misinformation.” That word, “misinformation,” has really surged since the Covid pandemic. While the bones of “misinformation” may have been alive and well before then, it was thrust full upon us in the discourse surrounding the politics of Covid and the US presidential election of 2020. Now, “misinformation” is a cliche. The term has become so ubiquitous that we expect to hear it. If we don’t, we know it by its shape.
The idea of the truth through the prevailing narrative was the impetus behind The Pain You Seek. At one point, the protagonist states a simple fact: “Claire knew that when a journalist takes down someone’s words and leaves, people have lost control of the narrative. Whose narrative is it now? How does someone ever fully correct inaccuracies?” This is not just a question for national politics and daytime news shows. It is a question about our own public-facing profiles. We manage our own narratives—how we present ourselves on our socials, how we present ourselves differently to friends and professional groups, how we present ourselves in public to people we do not know and to those who we want to respect us.
None of this is new, I realize, but the second part of Claire’s realization—who does the narrative belong to—is more tricky than it seems. Is it the one who produces it, or the one who consumes it? If you deliberately present yourself to others a specific way, what happens if they take control of it and cancel you, or promote you, or follow you in droves on TikTok or Instagram, or re-post something you said on X? Now you and them are linked: one’s narrative becomes part of the other’s. Once you put it out there, do you really control your own image?
And if you are not cancelled, or followed, or reposted…are you safe or just lost in the menagerie of posts that command more attention? These are the questions at the heart of the novel I've spent the last several years writing.
