Lydia Sandgren

“Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about what a person has a right to tell other people. As a therapist, it’s simple: everything you’re told is confidential. Outside the clinic, however, there are unfortunately no rules. There are those who believe the truth must come out at any cost, that the truth is always a force of good, and that in any given situation, you should insist on what you perceive as ‘true.’ But people construct their own narratives, for protection, to keep life in check. And if you disrupt a narrative, you have to be prepared for chaos to follow. If your narrative deviates too far from reality, if it’s built on fundamental misconceptions and grave misinterpretations, then the narrative can be a problem in itself, of course. And yet, it may be that that particular construct is what makes life possible in that moment. Most of us reinterpret and censor things now and then. Human memory is deceptive that way. We’re good at forgetting what’s painful and hard. Instead, we pick out some little episode that we buff and polish and tinker with until it has become emblematic of our history.”
― Lydia Sandgren, Collected Works: A Novel