What the Ogre Knows

As I do this research, learning more and more about my loved ones and myself, I do continue to feel like I'm peeling back the layers of an onion. What really happened, and why. The different selves that each of us showed to ourselves, each other, our closest friends, the outside world.

On Sunday I interviewed my best girlfriend from high school, who happened to be a grown, married man with children, even back then. But he knew me like a best girlfriend. I recently recognized that I'd been asking all these questions about my dad and my grandfather, but this book is supposed to be about me, too, so maybe it was time to get another perspective on the third character as well. Me.

Before we got to me, my friend told me about the day he met my mother. He prefaced the story by telling me what a poor first impression judge he is, and how he always has to go back and reexamine his first impressions. In this case, he said, he couldn't have been further from the truth. And then he told me,

When I met your mother, I thought it was all an act--the whole sweet Georgia girl thing--the accent, the unbelievable cheerfulness, the incredible optimism about absolutely everything, it was really . . . don’t ask me why, I’m just telling you I’m very bad at first impressions.

It was 1977. My parents were still married. I'm wondering if he's as bad at first impressions as he thinks he is.

Layers of the onion.

And then he went on to tell me about me. He talked about the me that he saw, and how different it was from the me that other people complained about. He saw me as funny, analytical, confident. He says my family worried about my "self-esteem problem," and others talked about the "hot-headed redhead," describing me as caustic and angry. One friend confessed to him that she had the most cynical person in Celo looking after her kids. Meaning me.

Layers of the onion.

And what was my perspective? I think I mostly agreed with the majority. I openly said I didn't like myself, and I generally thought of myself as prickly and angry. I did have plenty to be angry about, after all, whether other people knew it or not. And I saw my hard sarcastic shell as my only protection.

So why did my friend see something that no one else saw, not even me? Had I convinced myself that this protective persona was the real me, when my friend saw something else entirely? And had Mom done the same thing, but with a sunny persona instead? What were our real selves? Or are we all just made up of layers? Does the combination of layers, all together, make up the truth?

This I know: when you start peeling the onion, be prepared for the tears.