Fiction and Forgiveness

Article Presented by:
Copyright © 2008 John T Marohn


No one could have told me that writing a novel could turn out to be a form of therapy, a way of forgiving, an aesthetic venue for surrendering a rage that I had held on to for most of my adult life. Having just completed my first novel, Tiorunda Stories, I now know that it is possible to create fiction as a way of reframing memory, of recreating an old story, of reimagining the facts of my past in order to let go of an emotional albatross.

Most of us, I believe, go through life holding on some old resentment - anger at a parent, rage at a sibling, rejection of a lover, a teacher who may have failed us, a career we hate, and, of course someone who may have abused us, either physically or emotionally. Our rage may be totally legitimate. But, as I was to discover writing my novel, the pain I was to eventually let go of had really nothing to do with the empirical facts.

To this day, I do not know whether my father told my mother to leave or she left of her own accord when I was in my early teens. All I really know is that I held on to my rage well after I received my first social security check. I was to experience that anger throughout my adulthood at such a level that I literally hardened my heart against a woman, my mother, whom I neither knew nor cared to know.

It wasn't until I began to write my mother into my novel as a fabricated character that I began to feel into the anguish I imagined her to have felt in being abandoned into silence by her community and at least one of her children. The era my mother lived in when all of this happened was the 1950s, an era that judged women more harshly than men for leaving their children.

In the novel, I create a woman who is emotionally and psychologically rejected by her husband; I freely gave her a legitimate reason for her sexual "wanderings beyond the hearth," a phrase one of the priests uses in the novel. It was through these acts of infidelity resulting from the crushing rejection of the fictional character's husband that I began to empathize with my mother's plight.

It didn't matter to me that my novel was fictional, that I grafted onto my character an emotion that I had always felt because my mother was absent from most of life, or that I took the "rumors" of my father's emotional rejection of my mother and worked them into a fictional world.

What mattered more to me than any factual information about culpability was that I was psychologically freeing myself of an old wound, that I could literally create in myself the wonderful freedom of letting go, of surrendering to the sweet and tender spot of love that I never allowed myself to feel for my mother.

I am also convinced that we delude ourselves into believing that there is always a clear distinction between fact and fiction. One famous psychologist claims that trauma is the only reaction that never lies. And fiction, which one writer calls a "lie that always tells some truth" may be the only way that we can resolve the traumas of our early childhood. And I believe, in the end, that I have given it my best shot.


About the Author:
John T Marohn is a freelance writer living in Buffalo, NY. Tiorunda Stories is John's first published novel. He is currently working on a non-fiction book about alcohol recovery, The Journey, and a second novel about an Irish-American family living in Buffalo during the thirties. Tiorunda Stories - a dark, gothic novel about a fifties housing project outside Buffalo, NY. http://tiorundastories.com