The Four Faces of a True Story

5 days ago 9

Davin Malasarn is the author of The Outer Country, out today from One World. Below, he shares the experience from his own life that inspired it. (Content warning for homophobia and conversion therapy.)

By the time I decided to write about my Buddhist exorcism, I had already replayed it in my mind too many times. The monk coming to the house on a night my mother was away. My aunt and father telling me to follow his instructions. The chanting. The blessed water. The fear. I knew it all so intimately that I wasn’t interested in telling the story again.

What did interest me was my aunt’s point of view. I wanted to know why she was willing to take such drastic measures when she suspected I was gay.

So, I wrote a book from her perspective. A Thai woman immigrates to America to help raise her nephew. She catches him dressing up as a girl and worries about what might happen to him. She arranges for a monk to come and expel the feminine spirit from his body, but it only makes matters worse.

The aunt—this character doesn’t think of herself as a villain. She does what she believes is right. She acts out of love. Seeing the events from that viewpoint made me much more sympathetic to her, despite the damage that she causes. It made me more sympathetic to my own aunt.

I wrote that first draft of The Outer Country while I was working with the wonderful Jill McCorkle at the Bennington Writing Seminars. As a next step, she encouraged me to experiment, and so I wrote the story again, this time from the mother’s point of view. She didn’t know about the ceremony, but she saw that her son grew mysteriously ill in the days that followed. This caused a rift between the sisters, with one holding a secret and the other one left to deal with the aftermath. I was intrigued by this other dimension and the power of silence to push two people apart.

I continued on, telling the story from the boy’s perspective and then from the father’s perspective. With each new version of my book, I realized how many different interpretations there were of what happened. I realized no one could claim to know everything, but by pulling each of these versions together, they could reveal a more complete picture. As Allen Ginsburg said, “I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view.”

My debut novel, The Outer Country, is based on my true experience—or at least as much as I have been able to reconstruct of my true experience. But writing a first-person account of these events lacked the potential for discovery I need when I begin my work. To tell this family story, I had to step out of myself. I had to inhabit each of the characters. And if Ginsburg is right that there isn’t any truth, at least I could offer four different possibilities.