The truth is in the detail. Within the nuance of the story, the cadence of the voice, the tilt of the head, the flutter of an eyelash. People are anthologies of stories, mosaics made up of minor events, small truths that constitute who we are, what we believe in, the way we live.
Why do I shake my head every time I’m offered a flute of champagne? Because, I’ll laughingly tell my friends, I haven’t touched champagne since the night I graduated from my Bachelor’s degree and I drank so much I vomited out the back of my boyfriend’s 1974 Ford Falcon. Of course, I believed I’d opened the door, but then I sheepishly acknowledge that I hadn’t. And that admission, that self-awareness, that embarrassing truth, gives the story its required believability.
Before all of this began, I liked to think that I was a crusader for truth. It was a chalice brimming with indisputable goodness, the finding and the revelation of which would act as some form of emancipation from the other greatest defining feature of people: their secret.
Journalists are often regarded as creatures of prey. Great winged birds with curved beaks, who pick apart and rip through the meaty flesh of other people’s lives. As a breed, we are viewed as toxic to privacy and secrecy. With our counterpart parasites, the photographers, we splash the front pages of magazines and newspapers with dark secrets that are often trussed up with pithy puns: a picture of Donald Trump’s hair blowing in the wind captioned, ‘There’s gonna be hell toupee’; or President Bill Clinton’s acquittal at his impeachment trial, ‘Close, but no cigar’. These front pages give us what we creatures crave: money, success, greater opportunities. We march on, leaving a trail of carcasses in our wake…
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