The Fake Narrative

Personal narratives are never as innocent as we might wish them to be. They are manufactured, crafted with the precision of an editor who knows that some pages must be kept and others must be torn out so that the new storyline appears seamless. Ricoeur (1984) reminds us that narrative identity is always an act of emplotment, a stitching together of fragments to create coherence, and in this sense the introduction of a new character requires a revision of the entire plot. When a new person enters the scene, the stories are refashioned to show convergence, as if the two lives were always meant to meet, as if the rhythms of their pasts had been quietly rehearsing for this inevitable duet. What was once contingent is rewritten as destiny, and what was once merely accidental is reframed as necessary. The old text is folded, hidden, sometimes deliberately destroyed, because its persistence would betray the artifice of the new narrative. People who once mattered, who once carried the weight of the story on their shoulders, find themselves erased, their contributions reframed as trivial, their memories recast as unnecessary because the new entrant demands that. Barthes (1977) reminds us that authorship is always a performance of power, a choice about which voices to silence and which to amplify, and here the older friend becomes a casualty of narrative authorship. The one who stayed awake through anxious nights, who answered the sudden phone call, who corrected the draft with patience, who walked silently beside another in their moments of fear — that person now finds their place in the narrative reduced to a footnote, or worse, omitted entirely. In order for the new story to shine, the old must be extinguished. The new entrant, stepping into this carefully prepared narrative space, is almost always unaware of the construction. They inhabit the story as though it were natural, organic, true. They believe that their presence in the tale is the result of deep resonance, that the past and present align effortlessly, that they are welcomed because their story fits perfectly into the larger script. They do not see that the room they now occupy has been repainted, that other portraits once hung on these walls, that the jokes they are laughing at once belonged to another voice. Goffman (1959) would call this the presentation of self: the performance of authenticity that conceals the backstage work of editing, curating, and hiding. They walk comfortably through the narrative because it has been designed to fit them like a glove, but they cannot sense the hands that stitched the glove together, nor the scraps of fabric left discarded on the floor. Those who belonged to the earlier chapters of the story are left to watch, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with sorrow, often with a quiet recognition of how these things unfold. They see the narrative being refashioned, their role diminished, their presence excised. They watch as the gestures that once defined intimacy are now handed over to the new entrant, repackaged as fresh and unique, while in truth they are repetitions of what has already been lived. Bauman (2000) captures this with his notion of liquid modernity: ties are loosened, connections dissolve, and new bonds are formed with astonishing speed, always at the cost of erasing what came before. They know the mechanics of narrative manufacturing all too well — the selective memory, the deliberate silence, the clever re-narration that turns coincidence into inevitability. And they are caught in the uncomfortable position of knowing that protest is futile. To point out the erasure is to confirm it, to insist on their role is to mark themselves as obsolete, to demand recognition is to expose themselves as expendable. Yet even as they watch their narratives reduced and written off, there lingers a stubborn truth: stories cannot be fully deleted. They remain inscribed in memory, in the deep structures of experience, in the silent knowledge of those who lived them. The manufactured narrative may succeed in presenting a new, polished surface, but beneath that surface the earlier text endures. It survives in fragments, in echoes, in the unspoken recognition that cannot be erased no matter how much is rewritten. And this endurance is made sharper by the knowledge of all that has been quietly eliminated. The long drives taken together, sometimes in silence and sometimes in animated debate, where the very act of moving along a road seemed to mirror the unfolding of a shared journey, vanish from the official story. They no longer fit the new plot. The hours spent supporting an illness, whether through wordless presence in a waiting room, late-night phone calls of reassurance, or the quiet fetching of food and medicine, are written out as though they never happened. And the everyday work of running a business together — drafting plans, balancing accounts, making calls, solving problems side by side — is erased as if those mundane labors were always intended to be done with someone else. All of these acts, which once carried the heavy intimacy of trust and the slow accumulation of shared responsibility, are discarded in the manufacturing process, deleted not because they lacked meaning but precisely because they carried too much of it, too much evidence of a past collaboration that cannot be reconciled with the present performance of convergence. The new entrant does not know that these erasures exist. They cannot sense the ghostly trace of conversations once held during endless drives through the same roads they now travel. They cannot feel the memory of weariness and relief that once marked the labor of creating a video together for the shared business. They cannot detect the imprint of long nights bent over spreadsheets and plans, the invisible fingerprints left on the structures of a business that was once sustained together. For them, these spaces are blank, the rituals novel, the story pure. But for those who inhabited the earlier chapters, the erasures are unmistakable. They know the drives once carried the rhythm of companionship, the illnesses once revealed the depth of care, the work once built a fragile but real edifice of shared purpose. They know that the present narrative has been manufactured by deleting precisely these traces, by varnishing over them with the sheen of new convergence. And it is this knowledge that produces their peculiar amusement, the half-smile of recognition as they watch the same gestures replayed with different actors, the same rituals dressed up as new, the same story pretending to be original when in truth it is only a revised draft with the earlier voices struck out, the purchase of an airline ticket seems to be a marker of care when the old person did this as a routine activity, now discarded, because the new must be made to feel important. The palimpsest is always visible to those who know how to look. Beneath the bold lines of the new inscription lie the faint traces of the old. The story has been manufactured to entice the new, but the erased continue to haunt the text, their voices muffled but never extinguished. The new person may not know, may never know, but those who lived the earlier chapters carry the knowledge that the reality being presented is an artifice — a construction designed to make the present appear convergent, even as it rests on the quiet burial of the past. Arendt (1958) would remind us that this is the danger of narrative when it becomes performance without responsibility: the story dazzles the new actor, but those who know its earlier versions recognize it as an illusion. Foucault (1977) might add that this act of rewriting is a form of power — the power to define the real, to control memory, to manufacture truth by erasure. And so the blog itself becomes an act of resistance, an insistence that the palimpsest be acknowledged, that the erased be remembered, that the artifice be exposed for what it is: not convergence, but careful manufacture. For the narrative that is written away it is like the Taylor Swift song, the lament, “turn around and make it allright.” But that never happens.