When I wrote this book, when I wrote The Girl Who Drank the Moon, I was thinking a lot about the problem of false narrative and the way in which we can use stories to pull people together or we can use stories to drag people apart. And you see this happening sort of again and again in human history. I did not know when I wrote the book that it would become so very relevant now.
First of all, one of the things that we all need to do when we are given a narrative for how something happened, right, is to be able to step back and analyze; who’s telling the story, what’s being added, what’s being left out. And one of the things that I tell kids is because they’ve all had this experience, I tell them, you know, imagine a time when you’re in the kitchen and you’re in the kitchen with a brother or sister, and the pitcher of lemonade gets knocked onto the floor and your mother walks in and she sees the facts, right?
She sees the pitcher on the floor, she sees lemonade everywhere, she sees it’s really sticky, she sees two kids and she says what did you do to you. And she blames you. And she has done is that she has created a narrative. So first, second, third. First, you did some terrible thing and now the pitcher’s on the ground. And her narrative is justified by the facts that she sees. That narrative may be true or it may be false.
And, of course, I tell kids this and they’re like oh, my gosh that happened to me just four days ago. And so I think that that is an experience that a lot of us have in which we have all been, we’ve all fallen prey to being cast as the villain in a narrative that may not be actually true or at least it may not be the whole truth, right? And so I think that one of the things that I tried to do with this book is I tried to show that these narratives about this witch in the woods they’re all based on true facts, right, and the facts as they understand them.
But all of them have had a narrative that cast those facts in a sinister light. And if they can see that happening in real time, to be able to see how the narrative is telling them one thing, but they already know that this other thing is true, then perhaps that can help my readers to have that same kind of skepticism and that same kind of pushback on a dominate narrative, like is that really how those facts are, is that really the light that these are in?
Or is there another side to this three-dimensional object that I need to go around the entire thing to be able to understand the story as it actually happened not just as it’s being told to me?
That is something that I wrestle with a bit in the book as well. Because in the character of Xan, you know, Xan has her own false narrative as well, right, you know, she goes and she rescues babies in the woods and why are the babies left in the woods? Reasons. Right? And she does not push on that. And so she is actually also guilty and she comes to realize that as well. She comes to realize her own culpability that I mean how many decades and centuries of terrible sorrow and misery that she did have the power to circumvent and to end, but didn’t because she couldn’t see beyond the limits of the narrative that she was telling herself, right?
And so I mean even the good character, she’s limited to, and even the good character, Bi, is also guilty of the sin of omission and it is not … we’re guilty not only of what we do but what we fail to do as well. And she failed. So I think that none of us are, none of us get to sort of like pat ourselves on the back too much, because all of us have our blind spots and all of us have just the stuff that we don’t see.