Two Truths and a Lie

Two Truths and a Lie



“Images jiggled past, scenes from our tiny Ohio town of Galesburg. Christmas morning, four beautiful children in color-coordinated Santa pajamas, squinting; summertime, my older brother Jamie’s first home run; a station wagon hideously wrapped around a telephone pole, blood dripping down the passenger door...” (3). In Driving with Dead People, Monica Holloway wastes no time in setting up the structure of a deeply disturbed family, a childhood of glossy denial framed by darkness. By the seventh line of the first page, in fact, we have it in a nutshell:

“What happened?” I asked.

“No answer” (3).

The story is told by a narrator who asks us to trust her while she tells about a childhood where “I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t famous. I wasn’t anything. So I told lies” (33). To make it more challenging, she is telling the story as that child, with her confusion, “Why wasn’t he telling me what happened?” and her quickly drawn conclusions, “He hated me.”

On top of that, she is writing about a mother and father who, according to her, have a bizarre sense of reality. When she says, “My mom, who’d told me the earth was flat, always created her own reality” (7), we have no idea how far-reaching this statement will prove, taking us all the way through the book. What is most effective in the treatment of her mom’s version of the truth, though, is how it compels the narrator to question her own version, rather than just denouncing it as delusional. When the mom questions why she invited her dad to an award ceremony, Monica answers, “Because he’s paying for the pin they gave me and the new shoes I needed for the ceremony.” The mom answers, “Jim is the one who provides for you.” Monica is completely bewildered. “Was I crazy, or was she?” (177).

At the end of the book they argue about something meaningless and she hangs up, realizing, “Mom has some version of what that conversation was, and she has some version of who I am, and I don’t care what any of that is. It’s not the truth” (314). It takes her half her life to come to this conclusion, and we are taken carefully through the events, which help her finally get over that hump.

The dad, meanwhile, is baffling, as seen through her young eyes. She can’t figure out what he is so mad about and the truth is made multi-layered by the fact that the family seems to think it’s generally her fault for provoking him. Is it just that they’re better at denial than him or is she not telling us how she provoked him? One moment he’s cracking jokes at the BBQ, life of the party, but the next he is booting her Barbies across the floor” (39). Her childish analysis is “He hates me” but when she says the same thing about her teacher, her brother says, “She liked you but you wouldn’t stop talking” (45). Her response? “I rolled my eyes” She is clearly young and telling us about big things with a very limited perspective and we have to watch it develop to figure out what’s going on. This makes it more engaging.

Take this scene. “As we drove off, Dad gave a “great guy” wave to his friends. We’d barely pulled onto Highway 64 when he growled, “Quit kicking my goddamn seat.” I wasn’t kicking his seat” (43). Do I doubt that the dad is an asshole? Not at all. Do I doubt whether Monica kicked his seat? A little bit. And you know what? I really like that uncertainty, that messiness. It authenticates the story.

Holloway's telling of her family story and her journey to her truth develops very organically. She creates a very effective narrator by a constant questioning of that narrator’s reliability, by calling her a liar and revealing her lies through her interactions with family and friends. The dad tells her she lies. The mom calls her the great exaggerator. Her sister thinks she is blaming the wrong parent and is a troublemaker. She makes countless mistakes and misjudgments along the way. Her perspective grows and matures, but very, very gradually. Telling us your narrator is a liar and then rolling film is a bold stroke that works well here. Maybe it’s because all storytellers are, to some extent, liars and all readers are, to some extent, in denial. We don’t want the truth. We want the story.