REAL STORIES UNTOLD TRUTHS
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Real Stories, Untold Truths reads like a detective novel. Though it is introspective, it is also fast-paced, detailed, and full of mystery. I was eager to turn the pages to learn what would happen to J.C., the author's homeless friend. How did a seventy-something-year-old, former math teacher and father, end up homeless in New York City? Why was it sometimes hard for him to accept help when it arrived?
After reading the first book in this series, Have a Great One!, in 2001, I wondered if it would be difficult for me to get back inside the story since several years had passed. The transition felt effortless. It's not easy for an author to involve a reader so quickly. Laurie Anthony holds degrees in special education and social work, yet she also has a gift for storytelling. Her style is straightforward. Tightly packed scenes, unique characters, detailed settings, and seamless dialogue reeled me in.
In all friendships, the more you learn each other's secrets, the more you become aware that you can never fully understand another human being. In any meaningful relationship, our values and preconceptions are tested and that's how we grow as individuals. We humans are multi-faceted--a product of our genes, our environment, and our choices. These complexities are addressed in the book so well, I wish more background had been given about the racial strife J.C. must have faced living in the south before The Civil Rights Movement. Why do some people, like J.C.'s brother thrive after enduring great hardships, and others, like J.C., make so many unhealthy decisions? I wonder if that could be another volume in the making--the history of these two men.
The author approaches many sensitive issues with an open mind. Homelessness, mental illness, poverty, the sexual tension that may happen between men and women who become friends. She tells us how it feels to be manipulated, what it's like trying to trust someone who can be selfish, withholding, who sometimes suffers from distorted thinking and is often verbally abusive. The author's sense of self is plumbed each time a new revelation about her friend, J.C., occurs. She shares her journal with us, the letters she writes to him and sometimes does not send. We feel her angst, her hope, her disappointments and her headaches.
Though Laurie Anthony has returned to Ohio, where she teaches the fifth grade, she still visits J.C. in New York not only to work on the book, but to help him in times of need. She's strolled down the streets of Harlem, visited J.C.'s new living quarters, acted as a go-between with him and his relatives, lawyers, and old friends. She has kept in touch with his family and has journeyed to his home town.
I admire the author's tenacity, and also her inner strength. It is a challenge to nurture such a difficult friendship. Many of us would lose our patience after one of J.C.'s insults. On the other hand, I feel J.C. is to be commended for opening up to a woman who came from such a different world than he did. It isn't easy confiding in someone, let alone telling them your past mistakes. As a writer, I'm in awe of the amount of research and time these two books must have taken to complete in the midst of so many setbacks and frustrations. It's fun to imagine them marketing their book together after so many ups and downs in their relationship.
I did not approach either of these books as a technical treatise on the homeless. To me, it is an example of journaling at its best. This book in particular was not only about finding the meaning of compassion and friendship, but also about our accountability to ourselves and to each other, and knowing when to set boundaries. When does helping become enabling? How long can we continue to help someone in need if they do not try to help themselves? The book was about asking all the big questions: who, when, what, where, how, and why? And being OK with the realization that there are rarely easy answers to all of those questions. True stories do not always have the happiest or the clearest of endings.
If you are looking for a quick fix to societal problems, pat remedies for the human condition, a to-do list of " how to stop being that way" you won't find those here. This is a woman's honest, troubled account of trying to understand a complicated problem that needs to be addressed, while struggling with her own confusion in the process. She is on a path of rediscovering what friendship means to her. meets, then befriends one man and tells his story in an effort to help him out of a life-threatening situation: living without a roof over his head. She does not look the other way, or adapt a holier than thou attitude toward J.C.. You witness her unhappiness over many of J.C.'s choices and behaviours, but you never feel she will abandon the friendship once the book is done.
I recommend both books to educators and readers. It's bound to provoke many questions and could lead to discussions on drug abuse, homelessness, racism, mental health, and what it means to be a friend.
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