The Writer's Life: Jacob Aiello

This original essay from Jacob Aiello, is the first in a series of essays from the writers of The Portland Fiction Project.  You can read more of Jacob’s work here, and check out our interview with him here.

The Lie & How We Told It
An Original Essay from Jacob Aiello

The Portland Fiction Project is right now working on a series of stories in conjunction with Melissa Favara’s 1,000 Words Project, and what and who these two groups are and do I’ll save for another time or just allow you to discover for yourself (which, needless to say, you should, since they’re both worthy of your attention), but herein for the purpose of the following I’ll just say that the 1,000 Words Project is (from the website) “a bi-monthly reading based on the Oulipo, [which] challenges the writers who accept it to write under certain arbitrary constraints over one month and then to read the results of their labors in public.” There is traditionally an overriding theme to these challenges and the theme for this month is “lies,” which brings me to the subject at hand.

As I was writing late last night (in my underwear, which is how I always write, though sometimes also in a bathrobe if I’m feeling bashful), the “arbitrary constraints” fresh on the page and struggling, visibly, for a subject to write about, I thought about lies and how we tell them and how, in the paraphrased words of one of my favorite playwrights, it’s not really lying at all but a gift for fiction.

Theoretically, the lie is inherently a part of fiction but it’s a lie that can also serve as a kind of device for telling the truth within the veils and folds of quote-unquote fiction. What do I mean? Four years ago I wrote a short story called “Scrabble Night” about an estranged couple who meet once a month for a game of scrabble with exceptional stakes. If Sammy the husband wins, he’ll be allowed to return home, while if his wife Sylvie wins-as she always has-he will return to his hotel and the slow dissolution of their marriage will continue on its course.

The idea of the story was born from the passing of a relationship of my own, an endgame that seemed to drag on longer than the relationship itself through my grasping attempts to find some secret key, a magic word that would restore us to our former ardor.

The thing was, even while I was leading my protagonist to the inevitable realization that there was no magic word that could win him the game, that even winning the game was still losing the game, I was still looking for that magic word myself. Not just that, but I thought by describing this scenario I’d interpreted from my own and showing it to my girlfriend, all the tragedy and sorrow would manifest with its opposite, that my account of my own character’s inability to bring her back to him would justly and paradoxically bring her back to me.

Of course this didn’t come to pass. In the story, Sammy’s realization comes when he actually does win the game, only to find that it doesn’t really matter, that the game is just a buffer between his happy past and inevitable future and there’s no such thing as a magic word to bring her back, that the searching-for-words is only an anesthetic.

Sammy’s realization became my own some several months after the story was finished, after I’d shown it to my then ex-girlfriend, who enjoyed it but without the enthusiastic recognition that I in my anticipation had built up. I submitted the story to a local university press who accepted it much to my surprise, my first published work after years of uniform rejection letters. But the success was secondary and bittersweet. The story hadn’t achieved what I wanted it to achieve. Like Sammy, I had finally won the game after countless defeats but really I’d lost just the same.

So then there are all kinds of lies, really. There are the white lies and the noble lies, hyperbole and tall tales and exaggeration, lying by omission and perjury and puffery, the lies to make you feel better and the lies to protect you and the lies whose past participle is lain, even the liar paradox, but I’ve only ever come across one kind of lie that actually tells the truth, and that lie is entirely in how you tell it.