Hilton Als
The Women
The speaker in relation to his mother …
She spent many hours with me in the dark, in her bedroom, listening to me lie. Somehow she knew that most writers became writers after having spent their childhood lying. Or perhaps she didn’t know that at all. She was extremely tolerant of my lies. She was interested where my lies could take her.
And so we travel to a consideration of the relation to the reader — are we less interested in where the lies lead as in where they have come from? A detour — The Decay of Lying by Oscar Wilde — “If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once.”
And so for day 2919
09.12.2014