THE STORY GAP
by Freya Berry (2010)
Humans love stories. We can’t help ourselves: we are suckers for anecdotes, gossip, tales. Studies have shown that if we are told information in the form of narrative, we will retain it better than if just presented with facts and figures. Likewise, if presented with an object for sale, we will ascribe that object a higher value if it comes with a story attached.
People in power know well how to exploit this. It was Imelda Marcos who said, ‘Perception is real, and the truth is not.’ Subjectivity, not objectivity. Stories, not facts. Taking back control. Making a nation great again. We like to think we are objective, rational creatures, making logical decisions based on evidence, and this very belief makes it all the more easy for us to be manipulated. I wanted to explore this in my novel The Dictator’s Wife, which was published in February. Set in post-Cold War eastern Europe, it follows a captivating tyrant’s wife standing trial for her dead husband’s crimes. I had been a reporter on the 2016 US election and began writing it directly afterwards, with the establishment still reeling in shock at the result. They – we – had been telling the wrong story all along. To create my dictator’s wife, I drew on real-life figures. It is interesting that many first ladies know first-hand how to shape a story, or at least how to exist in someone
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else’s. Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, was an actress, as was Evita; Rosario Murillo, wife of Daniel Ortega, was a poet. Carrie Johnson was a press officer; Melania Trump, a model. Women have so long been the walk-on parts in men’s stories; the clever ones are able to weaponize this. My own character, Marija Popa, is in her early sixties, a glamorous shapeshifter and master PR woman. I wanted the reader to be constantly asking – is she innocent, or is she complicit? Has she softened her husband, or has she whitewashed him? Is she, one character asks rhetorically, the kind of woman who launders clothes or the kind that launders money? Ambiguity clings still to the roles of women and the spaces we leave for them: the gap between tradition and modern progress lingers on. Like Imelda Marcos in her 1990 New York trial, Marija protests that she is only a housewife, a mere woman who knew nothing of her husband’s activities. Yet at the same time, she is known to be the power behind the regime. ‘The Little Mother had the curious double-sidedness of a
