On Fact & Fiction - and the Men Who Understand Neither

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My father on a recent hiking excursion we took.

I write fiction and nonfiction both, and I’m always amused when someone, usually a man, tells me they don’t read fiction because they’re only interested in “the truth.” As though nonfiction were not policed by the arbiters of bias. As though truth were only material and never emotional or spiritual.

Over the weekend, I visited my father in his memory care home. He is a retired professor emeritus of sociology and now has alzheimers. We sat outside in the garden of the relatively new facility and he told me about a new friend he’d made, a woman we’ll call Julia. I knew about Julia because the nurses told me she and my father spent most afternoons in the gardens, talking animatedly.

“That building there,” said my father, pointing to one of the residential structures for the facility. “It’s from the FDR era. Julia’s father designed it. He was a great architect. They put a lot of money into the arts then.”

In fact, Julia’s father WAS a great architect, and he DID work under the New Deal. But unless he was a time traveler come back from the dead, he most definitely did NOT design the memory care residence building. But if you love someone with alzheimers, you meet them where they are. Correcting them is cruelty.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Yes,” said my dad, eyes shining with joy. “Moreover, the people who live there are the working class. The proletariat.”

Just as Julia was a great architect’s daughter, my father was a Marxist scholar.

“How fascinating,” I said.

“Julia and I go there most days, to visit with them,” said my father. “The workers. They are more down-to-earth. They watch movies, and they sing the old songs we all remember. The people over here (his building) are authoritarians. The fascists.”

“How wonderful for you both, to cross the divide in solidarity,” I said.

My father sat up taller, and smiled. He sipped the mango smoothie I’d brought him, for a taste of his childhood in working-class Havana.

In truth, the people in both buildings are residents of the memory care home.

But what is “truth,” for Julia and my father? The material facts alone? Or the deeper truths of who they once were, and how they carry the emotional weight of that through the dark and terrible forest of alzheimer’s with them, like lanterns with which they can find one another?

My father and Julia live next door to a working class barrio in Havana, where FDR paid her magnificently talented father to design a beautiful building where the poor can live and watch movies and laugh together. It is true and it is beautiful. There are “factual” men in this world who would correct them, because such men have never understood the deeper truths that live inside the stories people tell themselves and one another so that they might survive another day in an intolerably brutal world.