Walking the Wall

I started reading The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield the other
night when I should have been working on end of semester paper for my
medieval literature class. I really didn’t know what to expect–it’s
one of those books I kept passing by in the store and thinking "hmm"
but in some ways discounting it because of all the hype. Right away I
fell into the rythym of Setterfield’s language, but on page five, she
snagged me:

My gripe is not
with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what
consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth,
at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the
chimney? When the lightening strikes shadows on teh bedroom wall and
the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear
and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and
fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the
plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.

And
the story builds on this concept, of keeping the story going and going
to avoid facing the hardness of truth. But she also recognizes that
sometimes in a story, you can find the bigger Truths:

All
children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to
know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he
was born. What you get won’t be the truth; it will be a story. And
nothing is more telling than a story.