Turtles all the way down

Selfhood, story, and the recursive illusion of being real

We live in a web of carefully—and carelessly—curated fictions. This "Owen McGrann" who just slid into your inbox is a character I play, complete with the tics and traits you've come to expect. If I showed up talking about professional wrestling, you might raise an eyebrow. But if I started in on the collapse of civilization in 1177 BC and what it might teach us about our current moment, you'd probably think, "Weird—but on brand."

Lately, I've been thinking about what it means to know someone. Over the past few months, several (incredibly gracious) beta readers have been working through the shitty first draft of my novel, Pennhollow. We've had long conversations about whether a character would say this or do that. These are coherent, sensible conversations. We debate motivation, predict reactions, argue about consistency. Someone will say, "Ella wouldn't do that," with total conviction, as if Ella lives down the street and we've known her for years. "She's too proud." And we'll all nod, because of course she is. We've seen her pride play out over a dozen scenes.

What's strange is how natural this feels. How seriously we take it. Those of us who read fiction do this all the time; we get upset when a beloved character acts out of character. We have strong opinions about who Elizabeth Bennet should marry, as if we might run into her at a dinner party and need to offer relationship advice. We mourn fictional deaths and celebrate fictional victories with real tears and real joy.

Yet the most common reaction I get when I talk to people about writing fiction is: "Man, I don't know if I could just make stuff up, talking to myself like that." As if writing a novel is just randomly inventing things, talking to yourself.

But it's almost the opposite. I don't talk to myself at all. After living with these characters long enough, they develop their own voices, their own diction, their own moods and temperaments. I place them in scenes, and they misbehave. They refuse to do what I want them to—the things that would make the story easier to plot. And without fail, my interlocutor looks at me like I've lost my mind.

"They're not real, Owen."

Lately, I've started replying, "Neither are you."

And I mean it. Not in the Bishop Berkeley "I prove it thus!" sense, but in a much more unsettling way. We are all engaged in what Nietzsche recognized as the eternal creative act—constantly becoming rather than simply being, inventing and reinventing ourselves, telling stories that give shape to the chaos of existence. Our conceptions of each other are built on fragments, interpretations, performances. You see someone wearing a Patagonia puffy vest and construct a narrative. You watch a colleague chew out a waiter and weave it into your understanding of who they "really" are.

But there is no fixed "real" underneath it all. Even the people closest to us surprise us daily because we've mistaken our interpretations for truth, our stories for reality. We construct narratives to make others legible, to force coherence onto people who, like us, exist in a state of constant becoming. None of us possess some essential, unchanging core. You shift your speech, your posture, your very sense of self depending on context. The person who weeps at Little Women and the person who rage-tweets about politics—both are you, neither is the "real" you.

And here's what should terrify and liberate us in equal measure: your "authentic" self is just the most persistent story you tell yourself about yourself. You've curated your habits, preferences, opinions, reactions into a narrative of identity that feels solid, feels true. But this feeling is the grand illusion. You're performing "you" with the same creative energy I bring to performing "Owen McGrann."The difference is that you've convinced yourself your performance is natural, essential, real.

It's all fiction, turtles all the way down, stories nested in stories. What we call the self is nothing more than a recurring character in the ongoing novel of our experience.

When we sit across from each other at coffee, we're two improvisational actors playing roles we've forgotten we're playing, each convinced our script is more authentic than the other's. When we debate someone's motivations (why they acted as they did, whether such behavior is "like them") we're literary critics analyzing character development in a story we're all collaboratively writing.

This recognition doesn't diminish the meaning of our connections, it reveals their true nature. We are creatures who create meaning through narrative, who find truth not in some bedrock reality but in the ongoing act of interpretation and reinterpretation. The love you feel for another person is real precisely because it exists in the space between two fictions reaching toward each other. The characters in my novel matter not despite being constructed but because construction is all we have, all we've ever had.

We are condemned to be meaningful in a universe that offers no inherent meaning. And so we write ourselves into existence, draft by draft, revision by endless revision, hoping someone will read us with the same generous attention we bring to the characters we love most in stories.