'This is my truth, tell me yours.'

I don't have the context for the above quote from Aneurin Bevan but I do know that he famously called the Tories 'vermin' so let's suppose it may have been directed at them. That said, it's a polite enough request but not one that is always easy, or desirable, to fulfil.  

Many of us lie. Sometimes for honourable reasons, sometimes less so. There are lies we may tell without even realising we are not dealing in the truth anymore. Particularly when we lie to ourselves. 

For the American writer John Cheever lying (to himself, to others) was a mainstay of his existence. He was an alcoholic and bisexual at a time when homosexual acts were still illegal. There are times, documented in his journals, when he seems at ease with his place in the society that surrounds him; '...I take (his son) Federico swimming and find myself happily a member of the lawful world.' But there are equally times when the conflict that exists between his inner desires and the requirements of the outer world seems oppressively inevitable; 'I spend the night with C... I seem unashamed and yet I feel or apprehend the weight of social strictures, the threat of punishment.' 

Forced to lie about who he was, who he could be and wanted to be, Cheever spent much of his life a deeply troubled man. But, as a writer, it was this need to conceal the truth about himself that, as Geoff Dyer points out in the introduction to his journals, 'worked against (Cheever) being able to plumb the complex depths of his being' and instead hone the 'hard-won craftmanship' of 'fictive resolution' that made him such a supreme master of the short story. It was only in his journals, kept resolutely private until Cheever agreed shortly before he died that they could be published posthumously, that Cheever felt able to '...disguise nothing, conceal nothing...'  

Last night I heard the children's author Candy Gourlay describe the mantra 'Write who you are' as being much more useful to her as a fiction writer than 'write what you know.' In Gourlay's case, this gave her the impetus to use her own experiences in her writing. I, too, have adjusted the more common mantra into 'write about what (or who) you would like to know' as this resonates more strongly with my desire to use the experiences of others to inspire my ideas. 

In Cheever's case, however, writing who he was wasn't an option; not, at least, in his publishing life. In his private life, the work of his journals shows us that writing who he was was no less troubling and traumatic but that it was possible. In the end, it freed him from the demands of narrative structure and, perhaps more importantly, the agony of lying about who he really was.