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MARTHA SEZ: ‘They may well have their own reasons, but they are still wrong’

There are no different sides to a story, there are just different stories.

This, according to Marco, A character in “My Apology,” a New Yorker short story by Sam Lipsyte (July 5, 2021).

“People either believe yours or the other one,” Marco says. “Usually the other one.”

This nicely sums up a belief I have long held that the old saw “There are two sides to every story” leads to false conclusions. Certainly, everyone has a right to be heard–we are all entitled to our day in court–but the belief that there are, literally, two sides to every story is a gross oversimplification.

My first memory of the two-sides-to-every-story issue is of a disagreement I had with Cliff, my high-school flame. Cliff couldn’t truthfully be termed my boyfriend, because he was a chancy sort, showing up and vanishing again according to his whim. He was older than I was, and already out of school. My family hated Cliff; my brother referred to him as Hillbilly Heaven. I remember sitting at a little table in a Detroit diner with Cliff when he told me, as if pronouncing a profound truth, “There are two sides to every question.”

“Sometimes there are more than two sides,” I said, conversationally. We were sharing an ice cream soda. “There might be three or four sides.”

Cliff looked taken aback. “No,” he insisted. “There are always two sides to every story.”

He was sitting in front of a window, and I remember the bright sunlight shining through his ears, giving them a rosy glow. I had never noticed before how they stuck out. All at once the air of mystery that had surrounded Cliff dissipated; he looked a little like Alfred E. Neuman. It dawned on me that Cliff was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I was literally seeing him in a new light.

Since then, I have time and again noticed people using the two-sides-to-every-story cliche to imply a false equivalency between two opposing camps. Yes, I often think, they may well have their own reasons, but they are still wrong. Wrong is wrong.

Speaking of false equivalency: Once, someone told a friend of mine, judgmentally, “Well, it takes two to tango.”

“No,” my friend said, “sometimes I put on music and dance all by myself.”

It is surprising how even a person who grew up in the same house as you, went to school with you or lived with you as a roommate or spouse will remember shared events so differently. Sometimes I remember details from my childhood with precise clarity–only to be contradicted by my sister or another relative or an old friend telling me “No, that isn’t it at all.”

Their stories are different from mine. But what I say is, a house, or a building of any kind, residential or commercial or whatever, has sides. It must have sides. Sturdy, equiangular, load-bearing sides are essential to a building. Sides are not essential to a story.

A story is more like a river, or like any kind of waterway, not necessarily as grand as a river, fluid. There are gushing confluences along the way. Up and down its banks sediment washes in, and road sand. People heave in junk of all descriptions, from beer cans and fast food wrappers to old cars. Random flotsam and jetsam are borne on its currents. Children throw in sticks and toy boats and notes in bottles.

Sometimes this waterway will dry up, and at other times rains will swell it to flood stage and it will overflow its banks, causing inconvenience to riparian creatures, amphibian, rodent and human. Many will be forced to leave their homes. Stories can be very amusing, but they can also cause all kinds of damage. People can get drowned in stories.

A building must be planned and duly executed down to the last shingle, and even then a finish carpenter will be required, but may well prove elusive.

I still maintain, in accordance with what Lipsyte’s character Marco said, that a story has no sides. And I believe that everyone has a story. Not a solid, airtight story that might eventually need paint or a new roof, that might crumble and fall in on itself years from now as memory fails but is essentially a solid structure–No. A person’s story is a shifting, living, changeable, sometimes self-serving thing that grows or dwindles or transforms with new insights or forgetfulness over time.

Have a good week.

(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley. She has been writing for the News for more than 20 years.)

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