Michael Pruess
									12/2/10
									Rhetoric 129
									Final Project
Contradicting Accounts
I am interested in what happens when multiple accounts of a life or event conflict. At first, I was mainly going to test my creative writing prowess with this project: I was going to write several versions of the same story, framing each in the language and conventions of a different biographical style. There was going to be a commemorative account, an objective account, an autobiographical account, perhaps even an accusatory account. The writing complete, hopefully the project as a whole would reveal something of interest. What would the differences between the various versions reveal, I wondered. What interactions are there between different forms of biography, what are the dynamics?
Before I'd even started writing, though, while brainstorming ideas—which events should I treat in my multiple stories?—one possible connection revealed itself to me. My mind automatically flipped to the two pairs of "contradicting accounts" we read in class (Freud and Vasari, Hitchens and Spink). How much contradiction is there, anyway? In Stanley Fish's New York Times article on Sarah Palin's autobiography, he says that there is emergent truth even when an author is mendacious or self-serving. Similarly, it seems, from divergent accounts there arises a more comprehensive and true narrative. This is obvious, perhaps, insofar as more scientifically-minded biographers reconcile evidence when they work to provide the most objective biography possible. 

The Story According to Me
When I was eleven years old, my parents began a long and trying divorce process. It lasted around three years and involved suit over many inane things, custody of our pet cat being one of the most absurd. Where I would go to high school was fought over, with which parent I would spend what time was fought over; basically, it was a battle. A battle the outcomes of which I felt powerless to affect. My parents kept secret from me what they were doing to each other in court. All I knew was that they were disappearing to Oakland sporadically and that my lifestyle hung in the balance.
It goes without saying that they were not in the best of spirits in those days, and the occasional moody outburst of rage against the other darkened my opinion of both. My mom would often criticize how my dad was handling the proceedings—his "asshole lawyer" was a particular point of contention—and my dad would rant and rave about my mom's greed, dishonesty, insanity. Every time I would hear one such diatribe, my first reaction was to disbelieve, to reflect the indictments back upon their utterer. If my dad badmouthed my mom, I would think, "poor Mom!" and the next time I saw her I would be more sympathetic to her plight. At the time, I wanted desperately for some sign to tell me definitively: this parent is in the right. I wanted to know whose side to take, which of my parents to support. A silly thought, perhaps, but I was young and hurting: for myself, for my older brothers (whom I'd never seen crying before), and for my parents (though only one of them at a time). 
The sign never came, of course, and so for a long time I stewed, convinced that both parents were being ridiculous, that my brothers and I were helpless victims.
And what did I do, in the end? Nothing special. I kind of floated. School went on as usual, and though I maybe turned in a lower percentage of my homework than before the divorce started I'm loathe to attribute that to my home situation—fallacy of correlation and all that. My doctor recommended counseling to help me get through the hard times, but I didn't feel they were particularly hard. I adapted to living in two places, to going back and forth constantly, to no longer having dinner with both parents, to going days without seeing the cat. Eventually, I laughed off my parents' rants, called them on how ludicrous they sounded. Eventually I didn't miss the old house so much, and eventually my parents accepted that I didn't need psychiatric help to cope with something that's actually pretty routine at this point in America. 
And now, looking back, I can say the divorce did me a lot of good: it strengthened my relationship with my brothers and it made me way more independent. 

The Story According to my Father
stuff

The Story According to my Mother
stuff