I (that is me, Rubin Friedman) was just listening to a CBC radio broadcast about a Japanese writer who had written a novel in Japanese where he employs two different words for “I”.   One of the words is “watakushi”, which is gender neutral and objective, the other is “boku”, which is clearly masculine but both are first person singular pronouns used with verbs.

The author uses these two different words in two completely different narratives, which are intertwined in the text but separated by the use of the two different words.  He uses one consistently in one narrative, and the other consistently in the other narrative.

This poses a tremendous challenge for the English translator who has to use “I” in both cases.  The translator’s solution to this is very creative.   He differentiates the two narratives by the tenses he uses.  In one, he uses the past tense, the same as in Japanese.   In the other, however, he uses the historical present.  Very clever.

This ability to use different words for “I” in Japanese, would come in very handy in my little stories. 

Sometimes, when I tell a story, I exaggerate certain things or put in details that I don’t actually remember but am imagining as very possible under the circumstances.  I do this to fill in some holes in my memory and also to make the story more interesting.

Some stories contain so many of these exaggerated and imagined elements that I have to call them fiction.   Some are almost completely composed of imagined and invented elements.  It would be really handy if I could distinguish clearly among all these.  In particular, I wonder what it would be like if I could let the reader know which first person narrator is closer to the real me and which ones are not really me but persona I adopt in order to tell the story.

I have tried to do this by classifying some stories in “life” and some in “a little fiction never hurt anybody”.  This is not completely satisfactory.  I am trying to indicate that one class of stories is “substantially” true as I remember it, although given the number of years that have passed, I cannot always be one hundred per cent sure of every detail I put in.

The other stories may contain elements of incidents which actually occurred but which I have used and adapted for my own storytelling purposes.  So when you get right down to it, some stories sort of hover between these two categories and I am not quite sure which side of the ledger they belong on.  Then I put the story in both categories.

But in both cases I adopt a stance as the narrator which is semi-fictionalized.  People who read my humour column often think that everything I write about actually happened the way I describe it.  How do I explain that I tell things in a certain way to try to achieve a comic effect, not to document a history.  Sometimes I tell things in the first person that actually happened to somebody else.

For instance, the story about stealing fruit from the nuns actually involved my brother and he never told me the details of how he got caught or of his interview with the mother superior.  I just imagined a kid who was a little like my brother (and a lot like me) getting caught the way my brother was, imagined the details of the experience of that kid inside the convent, used my brother’s remembered reaction to the deal he and his friends made to come and pick up fruit at the front wicket and then created this narrative.

My brother really enjoyed the story.  Does all this make it “substantially” true or is it fictional?

The I who is writing this will never tell - and neither will I.