A Liar’s Life

Illustration by Bruce McCall. Click for larger image.

Memoirs have become widely suspect in our times: case after case of let’s call it fudging the truth, even of memoirists inventing their lives lock, stock, and barrel. So picture my dilemma as a con-fessed congenital liar writing a memoir — a literary first, as far as I know. Will anybody believe anything I say? Happily, my editor has decided to take the gamble.

My keenest early memories — I couldn’t have been more than five at the time — are of my father’s drunken rages whenever I told a “fib,” as he called them. Or am I making that up? Because, to tell the truth for once, Dad was a Baptist preacher and lifetime teetotaler.

Whoops! My editor has caught me red-handed. “Stop right here,” he’s scrawled in the margin. “Your old man was a janitor!” Point taken.

Humiliation is the congenital liar’s constant companion. One of my earliest real memories is of my first-grade teacher pulling down my pants and spanking me in front of the whole class for saying my dog had terminal cancer. She said I was just (“Whap!”) looking for attention (“Whap!”).

My sister says this is a pack of lies so far, except I don’t really have a sister. I made one up for no reason. That’s me all over.

Maybe I should start fresh.

I was born in a Turkish harem and abandoned two days later.

No, I wasn’t — damn it all, can’t a congenital liar ever go straight? I was actually born in no man’s land near the village of Albert on the Somme, between the German and French lines, during World War I. I never knew whether my parents were German or French, or maybe British, or even Alsatian. How would an orphan newborn know?

Okay, that’s not really credible, is it? For one thing, I’m not even forty-two years old. “Unearned credit is the forged cheque of a scoundrel” — Victor Hugo.

Victor Hugo never said any such thing. I put that in to make myself seem smarter than I actually am, cynically certain that nobody would bother to check it out, because Victor Hugo was always spouting off.