There Is No One True Story
Author and lawyer Margaret Klaw discusses the gray area of life, and how writing a novel posed different challenges than writing a nonfiction book.
Writing is my side gig. I’m a lawyer who’s been practicing family law for what feels like an entire lifetime, and so far I seem to be on track to write one book a decade, which track didn’t start until my youngest left for college. After one nonfiction book about my experiences as a family lawyer (Keeping It Civil: The Case of the Pre-Nup & the Porsche and Other True Accounts from the Files of a Family Lawyer, Algonquin 2013), I brazenly decided I should—and could—write a novel.
I decided this because in Keeping It Civil, which consisted of vignettes from my daily work life, my editor wisely had me create one narrative story woven throughout the stand-alone chapters in order to bind the book together as a cohesive whole. Unlike the vignettes, which were about real-life events with names and identities changed to protect client confidentiality, the narrative story, which was a custody trial, was fictionalized. It was a mash up of many custody cases I had handled, but it was fiction.
In other words, I got to make everything up. And I loved it. Writing the story of that trial was my favorite part of the book, and I think it turned out well, as many readers specifically mentioned how much they liked it. Hence, the naïve decision that I could write a novel. As it turned out, which will be no surprise to readers of this article, I couldn’t. I wrote a great 40 pages and then realized I was in way over my head.
Fortunately, I had writer friends who helped me understand the things we as readers are not necessarily conscious of, but as writers of fiction need to understand and employ: point of view, tense, narrative arc, and many more. The point of view and tense issues were particularly important to me because what I wanted to write, and what Every Other Weekend portrays, is the story of a marriage, divorce, and custody case from multiple perspectives: a story told in the round.
I know, from many years spent in courtrooms, that there are things that happen in people’s lives about which there is no one objective truth. Of course, some things are not that way: Did Dad pick up the kid late from daycare every day, or did Mom refuse to bring the kids to dad for his custodial weekends? These are facts which can be verified or disproved, and a courtroom is helpful in sorting those issues out, the disputes where someone is actually lying and the other is telling what we can all agree is the truth.
But that’s not what intrigues me. I’m interested in the distinctly gray area of perception. What ends a marriage? What happens between two people? Whose fault is it? People have different narratives to explain events in their lives, and they can be completely sincerely believed. That’s the rich territory I wanted to dive into in Every Other Weekend.
For some reason I’m still not sure of, the natural starting point that came to me was the first-person voice of the husband/father, whom I named Jake. Jake turned out to be a composite of many guys I have known: charming, attractive, used to getting a good reception in life, but somewhat skating on the surface, tending to minimize and overlook what’s going on underneath. I learned the term “unreliable narrator” after I’d written my first draft, and it fits Jake to a T.
As the other perspectives come in, which include Jake’s wife, Lisa, their 12- and 8-year-old daughters, Jake’s divorce lawyer, the divorce lawyer’s teenage daughter, the family court judge who presides over their custody case, Jake’s millennial polyamorous girlfriend, and even Pinky the family dog, the “truth” as Jake initially tells it shifts in multiple ways.
Additionally, to add another layer of perspective, all the characters live in the same politically progressive, urban, and somewhat self-satisfied community (an extremely thinly disguised version of my own neighborhood in Philadelphia—write what you know!), so their lives keep intersecting. At the local coffee shop, in the aisles of the food co-op, at the middle-aged guys’ before-work basketball game, after yoga at the studio, friends and neighbors meet up, gossip, dissect, and weigh in on various aspects of the demise of Jake and Lisa’s marriage and the ripple effect that follows. Hopefully, the result of these different viewpoints and Greek choruses of neighbors create a story that is truly told in the round—literally, from a 360-degree perspective.
As I mentioned, one of my goals for Every Other Weekend was that it would illustrate the principle that there is no one truth about many important things that happen in people’s lives. But I discovered that this ambiguity can make readers uncomfortable. There’s one thing that happens—in one of a number of scenes in the book featuring pretty bad behavior—that some early readers had different takes on, and they asked me: What really happened?
My answer was that I don’t know. I really don’t. I described the same incident from the perspectives of the two characters involved, and those characters went on to describe it differently to themselves and to others. I genuinely can’t say who’s telling the “truth” because I didn’t quite believe any of their versions as I wrote them. And that is the point: Reality can be subjective. Not everything in a novel can—or should—be tied up in a neat bow.
Margaret Klaw is a writer, lawyer and founding partner of BKW Family Law, an all-women law firm in Philadelphia. Named a Preeminent Woman Lawyer by Martindale-Hubbell, she has been recognized by Best Lawyers in America and designated a Pennsylvania “Super Lawyer” in the area of family law. Starting with day-in-the-life vignettes about practicing family law published in HuffPost, she has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time, and Salon, and is the author of Keeping it Civil: The Case of the Pre-nup and the Porsche & Other True Accounts from the Files of a Family Lawyer (Algonquin Books, 2013). Every Other Weekend is her first work of fiction. Find out more about Margaret at her website.
