Three Kids, Three Pasts: Tennessee Hill on Using Multiple POVs to Explore Shared Memory

As a multiple, there are three versions of my childhood: mine and the versions that belong to each of my brothers, cast in their specific wonk of memory. Some things tend to be the same, usually the place and the year, but other and more crucial elements like the exact happenings and resulting feelings are almost always in dispute between us.

This divergence in recollection began, I suppose, when we were of age to remember things, maybe three or four. Everything before that is held by our parents, who are always on the same page about what did and did not happen, when, where, and why.

As we got older and began to retell, for audiences of friends, stories of our shared tenth birthday party or the first day of eighth grade, our offerings were different, sometimes mildly and sometimes wildly different, and thus the storytelling often devolved into arguing. I’m not sure this is an exclusive experience to multiples, or even siblings, but I do think that our version of this particular tussle is what pushed me toward writing.

I learned as we got older that the focuses of my brothers’ and my storytelling were very different. I tended to bring up the classics: the funny, quotable and ultimately happy moments, while one of my brothers tended to pull forward the moments of conflict and grief, and the other’s memory seemed to only reach back as far as high school and anything we brought up before then he was unable to corroborate.

Often, I felt the inaccuracies mattered only to me, that I was the family storyteller, but in better more empathetic moments I can confront that my irritation was coming from a ferocious need for these stories and memories to be happy. My siblings and I have gotten in such fights about the happiness we did and did not allegedly experience, and I’ve come away feeling wounded or even betrayed at how differently three people can experience the same instance.

When I decided to write a novel about triplets, I spent an incredible amount of time fiddling with the point-of-view. The first few pages of my novel were written and rewritten in every combination of point-of-view and tense I could think of as I agonized over making the right decision.

And further, feeling very adamant that there was a right decision to be made. That there was only one point-of-view and tense that could truly capture the spirit of the story, which maybe other writers share in, but I feel, with time in distance, to be a bit melodramatic. I was terrified of leaving anybody—yes, fictional anybodies—or anything out.

Now, I think much of this was perpetuated by that writerly instinct to capture everything, but I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that it also comes from my preoccupation with controlling the capturing of my own life as I’ve spent so much time trying to reclaim that power.

The more I wrote and allowed myself to create fictions instead of recast fragments of memories, the more I realized that my anxieties about leaving out things or people were far more productive as an empowerment: stories are built on what is left out.

In Girls with Long Shadows, the triplets are linked by that uncanny psychological and physical sibling familiarity; if one sister has a headache, the other two’s temples pulse with empathetic pain. This intense physical sharing of time and bodies is only further upended by inability to agree upon the ways and reasons why things happened and continue to happen to them.

This is the rub, I think, in being a multiple, the reason why I—and these characters—get so out of sorts when they can’t agree on the past: how can we have shared a body, a birthday, and a childhood and not agree upon it?

The choice to keep the narration of Girls with Long Shadows with one sibling, middle triplet Baby B, was a poke into my own side, a way to force myself to examine the inextricable biases of our own perspectives and its implications on a larger story. When I allowed the story to prioritize the disconnect in the sibling relationship, I quickly found myself swept away by its power, astonished at how much organic tension can emerge from the smallest moments of disagreement or whispers of misremembering.

The multivalence of a simple, “Huh. That’s not how I remember it,” from one of the sisters was thrilling. Even more powerful to discover that though I was working through fictional figures, that there was rarely malice in these moments of disconnect.

I was immediately softened and ashamed by this at the erratic ways I’d railed against my siblings’ recounting of, yes, our moments, but at the end of the day, theirs, too. This reminded me further of what I’ve always known about literature and periodically ignored about life: the story is in the different ways each of us experience the world.

The sister in me got so used to asking: why don’t you agree with me? It took the distance of fiction to realize that the only part of the question that really matters is the why.

No, it should not have taken my writing a novel to get there. I am in awe of the power of literature to dismantle ego and become a mirror, both for the reader and the writer.

Initially, I decided to write a novel about triplets because I figured, as we’re often advised to, that I ought to write what I know. After the novel was finished, I found myself aghast and kind of delighted by just how much I don’t know, and just how clear novel-writing has made that.

It has given me a freeing peace with my version of my family’s shared stories and has allowed me, in those moments of stark disagreement on shared experience which definitely still happen, to be more interested in asking why those close to me felt and saw and did what they insist upon, instead of being consumed by insisting that they didn’t.

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Girls with Long Shadows by Tennessee Hill is available via Harper.