The Truth Commission

Books by Susan Juby

THE ALICE TRILOGY

Alice, I Think

Miss Smithers

Alice MacLeod: Realist at Last

 

Another Kind of Cowboy

Getting the Girl: A Guide to Private Investigation, Surveillance and Cookery

Bright's Light

The Truth Commission

FOR ADULTS

Nice Recovery (memoir)

Home to Woefield (Canada: The Woefield Poultry Collective)

Republic of Dirt: Return to Woefield

VIKING

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First published in the United States of America by Viking,
an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015

Text copyright © 2015 by Susan Juby

Art by Trevor Cooper, copyright © 2015 by Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Juby, Susan, date-

The Truth Commission / Susan Juby.

pages cm

Summary: As a project for her “creative non-fiction module” at a school for the arts, Normandy Pale chronicles the work of the Truth Commission, through which she and her two best friends ask classmates and faculty about various open secrets, while Norm's famous sister reveals some very unsettling truths of her own.

ISBN 978-0-698-15102-4

[1. Truth—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction. 3. Artists—Fiction. 4. Family problems—Fiction. 5. High schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.J858Tru 2015

For my mother, Wendy

First let me say that this will not be an easy tale to tell, so I'll warm up with an author's note. That's one of the great things about creative nonfiction. You can write forewords and author's notes, prologues and prefaces before you start the actual story. They are the writing equivalent of jumping jacks and shadow boxing. Fiction writers are supposed to get right to it. Visual artists have it even worse. Most assume no one will read their artist statements before looking at their art. Michelangelo didn't write a preface about where he got the stone for David or an author's note about why he decided to make David's hands so big and his . . . well, never mind.

But authors expect responsible nonfiction readers to read every word. They get to tell the reader what she's going to read, as well as why and how it was written. So here goes:

This is my Spring Special Project for the second term of grade eleven.

The story that follows covers the period from September until November of last term. I can't believe all this happened so recently. It feels like a thousand years have passed.

Here's how this project is supposed to work: Each week I will write and submit chapters of my story to my excellent creative writing teacher.
1
She will give me feedback on those chapters the following week. I will write as if I do not know what will happen next—as if I'm a reporter, which is a device used in classic works of creative nonfiction.
2
When the whole manuscript is done, my teacher will share it with the project's second reader, Mr. Wells, Prince Among English Teachers. When those two arbiters of taste, style, and content sign off on what I've written, I will have my mark for the Spring Special Project.
Et voilà!
as we've been taught to say in French class.

What else do I need to say in order to begin? This might be the time to bring up my use of footnotes.
3
I know not everyone loves them. When we read that heavily footnoted David Foster Wallace essay about going on a cruise,
4
students were divided. Some of us loved the footnotes because they were funny and informative and demonstrated DFW's virtuosic vocabulary. Some of us thought they distracted from the main text and were annoying. Still others of us never do the class readings and so really shouldn't get to have an opinion.
5
I don't want to test the reader's patience too much, so here's what I propose.

I will use footnotes to address my editor. I may also use them to include things that a) are interesting, and b) don't really fit in the main text, but nevertheless seem important. I may decide to stop using them partway through the story. Who knows what will happen? My random approach to footnotes might help build tension, which is a very big deal in fiction and in nonfiction. I might also decide to add illustrations and doodles in or near the footnotes. (Readers who are not giving feedback and assigning marks to this project can skip the footnotes, but those readers will be missing interestingness, diversity, and art, and those are things no one should ever miss.)

Finally, and even though this is an author's note and not acknowledgments,
6
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the powers that be at Green Pastures Academy of Art and Applied Design for allowing me to write a nonfiction manuscript for my Spring Special Project. I know other students here at Green Pastures are doing things like creating life-sized replicas of NASA's
Opportunity
rover out of circuit boards, old washing-machine parts, and antique fish tanks, and weaving huge wall hangings featuring images of our prime minister clinging to Parliament's Peace Tower like King Kong in a sweater vest, so a regular old written story, especially a true one, seems a little prosaic and uninspired.

My best friend Dusk is doing a tabletop installation featuring a taxidermied shrew in a shrew-sized mobile home. My other best friend, Neil, is doing uncanny paintings of beautiful women. Just when you think you understand how attractiveness works, Neil's oil paintings will make you reconsider.

Their work is so physical and concrete. So
art
-y. It makes me doubt myself as I sit here at a computer, typing out words onto an electronic page. Sure, I do fine art or I wouldn't have been admitted into this school, no matter who my sister is.
7
I draw, I make stuff, and I'm a stitching fanatic (current obsession—embroideries that look like paintings), but I believe that writing is as much an art as any other. Some might fight me on this point, and they would probably win, because I'm not very tough—physically I could stand to work out more—still, I remain sort of convinced.

This story, which my creative writing teacher tells me falls into the “much maligned category of creative nonfiction,”
8
is complicated but it wants to come out. It
needs
to come out.

Warning: Sometimes when I write, I find myself lapsing into what Mr. Wells calls “high turgid English.” That happens when I'm not quite warmed up enough. My hope is, the further I get into this story, the more I'll move into “plain English” or, as Mr. W. styles it, “effective writing.” I'm extremely nervous about telling all this stuff. That's the plain truth. Maybe I should write a preface or some other front matter next.
9

EPIGRAPH
10

Tell all the truth but tell it slant.

—EMILY DICKINSON

All I know is what I have words for.

—
PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS,
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.

—
STRAIGHT UP AND DIRTY: A MEMOIR
,
STEPHANIE KLEIN