My Crush With Celebrity

The New York Times Lives article that I read was "My Crush With Celebrity" by Ben Dolnick. What I found appealing about the story is that the author takes a simple thing that many people can relate to, having a childhood crush, sprinkles it with the involvement of a celebrity to gain interest, and then goes on to tell a story that explores the topic of memory and fiction. How our ever fallible memory can be effected by the stories we tell, to the point that eventually we begin to believe that what we write is in fact something that really happened to us. It offers an intriguing insight into the mind of a writer, and of people who are susceptible to having a faulty memory.

Dolnick offers an interesting view of this through a quote by William Maxwell "In talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw." It speaks to how telling an event, or a story, can distort what we  perceive as the past. It works in such a way that "the telling overwrote the experience" and fiction becomes entrenched with the fact of the past. Then it becomes easier to tell a story then to truly memorize ones history, as for a story, one "goes to the trouble of giving it shape," in contrast to the past which happens to them.