Tessie D

Three years ago, when I was a senior in high school, we were assigned to read and write a response to Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.”

I wasn’t all that excited to read it, to be honest. But I went home and started it that evening. I still remember feeling almost manic reading that book. Not only did I understand what Woolf was saying, but I could relate.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.”

I knew what it was like to want money and a room of my own. My essay response was passionate and heartfelt. I would major in literature in college and become a writer myself. I wrote the essay in my own voice, using words and phrases that felt so authentically mine.

I got a B- on it. Because, apparently, my voice is grammatically and stylistically incorrect.

I went back to the library last week and checked it out again. I reread the passages that felt like they were written directly to me and had inspired me to believe, even if for a moment, that I could go to college, read all of the books that I’d ever wanted, and be the kind of writer I’d dreamed of becoming.

“Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore I propose, making use of all the liberties and licenses of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here–how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life. I need not say that what I am about to describe has no existence; Oxbridge is an invention; so is Fernham; ‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping. If not, you will of course throw the whole of it into the wastepaper basket and forget all about it.”

A fictional account can be truer than any memoir or autobiography. Someone would say, “That’s not really how it was” or “It didn’t really happen that way.” But in fiction, we can get to the true essence of an experience, rather than being hindered by accuracy.