Fact, Fiction and Facebook

from the inquiring mind
of children's author and educator
Barbara Jean Hicks

The 2013 Summer Double Issue of Time magazine is all about happiness, or more specifically the pursuit of happiness--or more specifically yet, as the lead article is titled, "The Happiness of Pursuit."

Author Jeffrey Kluger has some interesting things to say about happiness: among other things, that Americans are hard wired for it as the descendants of immigrants--peoples from all over the world who believed there was something better than the life they were living where they were living it and chose to pursue a dream. That, in fact, the pursuit is the thing, more important in the achievement of happiness than the reaching of a goal intended to make one happy.

Good stuff for a writer of fiction or narrative nonfiction. A story arc is all about the pursuit of a dream and the change that pursuit brings about in a character.

But I was especially intrigued by the answers Americans gave to two questions about social media asked in a "happiness poll" conducted by the magazine: 1) Do you believe that people make themselves look happier, more attractive and more successful than they really are in their social media profiles? 2) Do you believe your social media profile reflects what you are really like?

76% of the respondents said they believed that Facebook and other social media profiles posted by other people are false--that most people are lying about themselves and their lives, or at least making up a good story. Yet 78% of those same respondents claimed their own profile was a 100% accurate description of themselves!

So who's lying and who's telling the truth?

One of the things I love about good fiction is that sometimes it can be truer than fact. It addresses the human condition on levels that go far beyond what is empirically true. It takes the reader to the heart of emotional and experiential truth, things that cannot be codified or dissected or proved right or wrong.

The truth is, the lies we tell ourselves are part of the truth of who we are. We don't always see things in ourselves that others do, and the fact that we don't says as much about our true character as any list of empirical data we use to describe ourselves. It seems to me that understanding this concept can take us deep into the hearts and minds of the characters we create and make them richer, more complex and ultimately more human.

I remember studying Henry James's The Turn of the Screw in college and identifying the prim governess as an unreliable narrator. I wonder now... Is any narrator truly reliable?

Is any person?

Related articles

The Happiness of Pursuit