Jennifer Johnston’s Truth or Fiction is a slight, upright novel, and the physical presence of the book echoes the ethereal nature of the story within it. This isn’t to imply that the story is lacking power, emotion, or heft, but that it, and the memories and stories it contains, spin a thread that feels slippery, as if the flex and jolt of the characters and their interactions make the entire novel impossible to grasp.

It begins with an argument.  Not without cause, for it is the unspoken dreams that are often missed the most, and when Caroline’s partner finds success and suddenly wants to get married, the years of deferring dreams and unspoken compromises push Caroline out of the house, of her life, to go look at the life of someone who has already “finished” his career, someone who is ready for a journalist to come along and tie all of the strings together, to tell the truth of his life.

Of course, Desmond Fitzmaurice is not done living, nor is the life he recounts entirely trustworthy.   And his stories, some told to Caroline outright, some recorded for posterity, some shown through the eyes of his ex-wives, children, and friends, sit uneasily next to each other. Even everyday happenings, where he goes and what he does, are coloured with the fiction he prefers, with the control he exerts over life and story.  In some ways, he lets Caroline in.  He exposes the memories he has chosen to record, the version he has decided to tell himself and the world, but they seem unable to form a complete story.  Instead, each memory has a life of its own: both disturbing and uncertain, confused and pointed.

Desmond Fitzmaurice is at first an excuse for Caroline, a reason to flee from a fight and a way to look for some distance from the life she has created for herself, but, by the end of the novel,  Fitzmaurice is far more than a handy reason to take a trip; he is a living example of the power of memories to define you, of the power left to the one who gets to tell the story; for even in his grief,  Fitzmaurice is defining the narrative, constructing himself and those around him, wondering what existence is if not one’s place in the memories and lives of others.

It disappears and I would be left with nothing. I could be left without her. For years I was without her. The inside of my head was full of blackness…Bereft is the word I have to use. For years I was bereft, a shadow, no one saw me, spoke my name, no one read my books. I sometimes wondered if I had ever existed. My mother had died and then Abby died and there was no one left to love me any more. No one to know who I really was.

These ideas of love, of identity, of remembrance, twine together as Caroline is drawn deeper into Fitzmaurice’s past. She struggles to extricate herself from the memories he has woven around her and the realities of his day to day life, from the efforts he makes to reshape the world around him and the memories he has left. His life is swirling into confusion, and his stories and his memories, his fiction and his truth, are no longer distinguishable. Caroline’s job as a journalist is to report the truth, but what she is being presented with as truth seems less trustworthy the more she interacts with Fitzmaurice. It is as if his insistence that his past be brought back, that he be able to live his memories again by telling them to the world, has warped the fabric of his life in some way, that his lack of anyone who truly knows him has left him without definition.

Johnston surrounds this unstable past with characters that are no more fixed.  Fitzmaurice’s current wife, his ex-wife, his children, all seek to define the world around them, all tell stories of their own of what happened in the past, and what is happening now. In the end, it is not a question of truth or lie, creation or reality, but something more complicated.  There is a sense of hunger for the love and attention of others and a question of the power of the past over the dreams of what will happen next.  For, without a future to rely on and strive for, it is necessary to look for another way to continue, and, according to Fitzmaurice:

Memory feeds us.

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