{"id":13963,"date":"2014-11-20T16:59:28","date_gmt":"2014-11-20T21:59:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/?p=13963"},"modified":"2026-03-26T09:59:50","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T13:59:50","slug":"truth-evening-lynn-coady","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/2014\/truth-evening-lynn-coady\/","title":{"rendered":"The Truth Is…: An Evening with Lynn Coady"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n
\n\n
\n
\n
\n

\n The Truth Is…: An Evening with Lynn Coady\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n
\"Caption:
Caption: Lynn Coady discussing storytelling, discomfort, and the nature of \u201cTruth\u201d with a rapt audience in Carleton\u2019s Kailash Mital Theatre on October 23rd, 2014<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

by Olivia Polk<\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Truth will set you free.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s an age-old aphorism that never gets less annoying, in large part because most of us would rather reach for a cigarette or a bottle of wine than engage with that intimidating capital T. But, as Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author Lynn Coady revealed in her 2014 Munro Beattie Lecture, there is another kind of mood-altering substance out there that is far more capable of distorting and embellishing Truth (and far less likely to fall under government regulation): storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t be misled: Coady\u2019s talk, appropriately titled \u201cOn Storytelling and Discomfort,\u201d was no post-modern exegesis on scepticism\u2014though she did, incidentally, graduate from Carleton with a double major in English and Philosophy in 1993. Rather, it was a characteristically humorous, and occasionally irreverent, rumination on the various ways in which humans make use of narrative in their daily lives. Whether it\u2019s settling into the sympathetic arms of a favourite sitcom (there\u2019s something rather comforting in the knowledge that Coady, too, enjoys returning home after a miserable day and watching an episode of Nashville<\/em>), or embracing the intellectual and emotional challenges of a proto-modernist text (like Chekhov\u2019s maddeningly ambiguous stories, for instance), we cleave to stories like lifelines, demanding that they numb us, stimulate us, or generally just help us make sense of the chaos of our experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, the tricky thing about stories is that they don\u2019t always tell us the truths that we want to hear: the painless, vindicating truths that fit in so very nicely with our conception of the world and our place in it. One minute, we might find ourselves getting covert pleasure out of recognizing the foibles of a relative or a co-worker within the covers of a Jane Austen novel. The next, the words become less like a window and more like a set of funhouse mirrors. And, according to Coady, it is when \u201cwe recognize versions of ourselves in the stories of others\u201d that the real squirming sets in. \u201cThe Truth,\u201d she says, \u201cis innately uncomfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, the question then becomes: what kind of cringe-inducing, hand-wringing, eye-contact-avoiding discomfort has Coady herself experienced in her years as a storyteller? Well, that\u2019s a story in itself, and it\u2019s one Coady continues to tell in the hopes that, the more she tells it, \u201cthe less uncomfortable (she) will be with it.\u201d As it stands, she\u2019s had no such luck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It started with the publishing of Mean Boy<\/em> (2006), a novel based on the life of. . .well, not of the <\/em>Canadian poet and English professor John Thompson, but, in Coady\u2019s words, \u201cof someone like him.\u201d The real story of Thompson\u2019s life\u2014a story marked by poetic brilliance wedded to depression, alcoholism, and stints in psychiatric-care facilities\u2014was too despairing for the kind of story she wanted to write. And so she did exactly as her job description on Twitter suggests: she made stuff up. \u201cStuff\u201d that quickly became fodder for scathing criticism at Mount Allison University in Sackville, Nova Scotia, where John Thompson taught before his tragic death at the age of 38.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t until she arrived at Mount Allison to give a reading from Mean Boy<\/em> that Coady became aware of just how much acrimony her novel had inspired in that community. There was a general feeling, it seemed, that she had appropriated Thompson\u2019s life with little regard for Thompson the man, or for those who were close to him. And while Coady doesn\u2019t deny the general selfishness of the authorial act, being welcomed to the university as a persona non grata<\/em> took her off guard. Nonetheless, Coady soldiered on and came up with a plan, which included, among other things, choosing \u201cthe funniest portion of my novel to read, to get the audience on my side.\u201d She\u2019d fielded tough questions before. She could, in fact, handle it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, for the most part, she did. The reading itself went well; the subsequent questions were easy to answer. The real discomfort, the one that remains with Coady to this day, came afterwards, when a woman stood up and announced that her name was Sherrie \u2013 \u201cthe Sherrie who knew John Thompson.\u201d And the Sherrie whose name, by sheer coincidence, had found its way into Coady\u2019s novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point, the author realized she was trapped. \u201cThere was no way that I was going to be able to convince her that it was a coincidence,\u201d Coady says. What is more, she instantly knew that neither a quick wit nor a long-winded apologia would have been particularly useful or appropriate at this moment. With few choices left to her, Coady remained silent as the Sherrie-who-knew-John-Thompson demanded to know just who Coady thought she was, exactly, to be taking someone else\u2019s story and making it her own? What kind of person would do that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suddenly, the funhouse mirrors of Coady\u2019s fiction were being turned towards her. And though every artist is aware of the inevitability of harsh criticism, the ire levelled against Coady by her Mount Allison audience felt shattering, for it questioned the very quality of her character. \u201cI never expected to be accused of being a shitty person,\u201d she admits. \u201cIt\u2019s not often that someone speaks your secret fears to you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For her part, Coady tends to view the kind of deep-seated defensiveness that both she and her Sackville audience members displayed that night as symptomatic of a confrontation with the \u201cterrifying depiction of something real,\u201d but a depiction that is \u2018off,\u2019 or distorted, in some way. It inspires an irrepressible need to combat one \u201cversion of the truth\u201d with another, more palatable one\u2014the one that we want to believe in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s the thing about the truth, Coady seems to suggest: it can\u2019t be explained or elucidated without losing the capital T and making it a plural. Because as soon as it is being spoken or written, it is being narrated, and a narrative, by virtue of having a narrator<\/em>, is unavoidably subjective. Indeed, during readings from her Giller Prize-winning short story collection Hellgoing<\/em>, Coady drew a comparison between two stories in which Truth, unmoored from characters\u2019 narrations, and even from the author\u2019s own control, is reduced to an onomatopoeic \u201cBoom.\u201d Pure, untainted experience, it would appear, is beyond the reach of words. So we alter, we distort, we \u201cmake stuff up\u201d in order to create an emotional trajectory for ourselves that is intelligible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But is there any way to reconcile these various \u201cversions of the truth\u201d? Is there some means by which we might stand face-to-face with (our and not our) Sherries without losing faith in the integrity of our narratives?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Coady, the only solution has been to keep writing. Bruised but also inspired by the incident in Sackville, she began drafting The Antagonist<\/em>, an epistolary novel about a young man named Rank who attempts to reclaim his life story from the pages of an old friend\u2019s book, only to discover that telling the Truth is far more difficult than he had anticipated. According to Coady, the opening pages of the novel lost her a number of readers. But she was okay with that. \u201cIt is <\/em>called The Antagonist<\/em>, after all\u201d she laughs. And, besides, where does the value of a story lie if not in its various capacities to hurt and comfort, heal and reveal?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one of his more accessible poetic efforts, Wallace Stevens reflected on the violence of conflicting stories by arguing that \u201cThere is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, like the clashed edges of two words that kill.\u201d But the very practice of storytelling is predicated on the existence of more than one narrative. We will spend our whole lives engaging with them, fighting with them, letting go of them, and learning how to accept them for what they are. The one thing Coady seems sure of, though, is that whatever we do with these stories, and whatever discomfort they provoke, we must continue to tell them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Author Olivia Polk<\/a> is a fourth-year student in Carleton University\u2019s Department of English Language and Literature<\/a>.  She also blogs for FASS.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Olivia Polk \u201cThe Truth will set you free.\u201d It\u2019s an age-old aphorism that never gets less annoying, in large part because most of us would rather reach for a cigarette or a bottle of wine than engage with that intimidating capital T. But, as Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author Lynn Coady revealed in her 2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[26,29,30,25,849],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-olivias-blog","category-philosophy","category-student-blogs","category-student-voices"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13963"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53691,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13963\/revisions\/53691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}