So are the fictions that the American West was an empty place, apart from white settlers, where any man could make his own destiny. Those deceptions are foundational in American history.
The cherry-tree myth was wholly invented by a biographer, and Washington used trickery, forgery, and spying to his advantage in the Revolutionary War, Amy Zegart explains. Drawing on the work of Jonathan Gottschall, Kelly says that we tweak our memories and anecdotes to pull meaning out of chaos.Įven George Washington could, in fact, tell a lie. After all, lying is ubiquitous: “We all have a tendency to fictionalize, whether we realize it or not,” Maura Kelly writes. That’s true regardless of whether a character or a narrator means to be malicious. Spinning falsehoods is its own kind of storytelling, and when it happens within a book’s plot, it can be fascinating, destabilizing, or both. No one can make a story sing quite like a liar.
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