The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

Unlike the other chapters, this chapter does not open with the same story about the earth being constructed on the backs of turtles. Instead, King begins with his usual transition line: “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (153). He then launches into his final dichotomy: the difference between public and private stories. He mostly thinks “of oral stories as public stories and written stories as private stories” (154), though he admits (as he usually does with dichotomies throughout the text) that the distinction is far too simplistic, as reading and hearing can both be public or private acts. Regardless, he tells the reader one of his “private stories,” though he admits that referring to it as such sounds “hyperbolic” and renders the story potentially “just another cheap literary trick” (155).

The story concerns his friends John and Amy Cardinal. They have three children, one of whom, Sam, is an adopted child who “suffers from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD)” (155), a condition that causes developmental and behavioral problems. King’s family and Cardinal family spent a lot of time together, but eventually Sam’s behavioral problems “intensified” and made seeing them more problematic, and made John angry, leading King to distance himself from them “until it was as though [they] had never known each other” (161).