Rewrite the Version of the Story That Survived

A couple of winters ago I read The Anomaly by Herve le Tellier. It was a book I had thrown myself into in the midst of grief after my dad passed away, and it was the kind of story in which you could completely lose yourself. I devoured it every night after Lily went to sleep.

The Anomaly is not just a fiction story—it’s a philosophical exploration of simulation theory. Le Tellier walks around the theory and ultimately makes peace with it, despite its problems and moral questions.

I’m not a fan of simulation theory, but the way le Tellier explores it made me feel that he kept our humanity intact and helped me intellectually try it on without feeling completely freaked out.

Aside from the philosophy, his storytelling and prose are fantastic. Le Tellier has dozens of good lines, my favorite being: “No author writes the reader’s book, no reader reads the author’s book. At most, they may have the final period in common.”

This line is so delicious (as a writer) because it’s true—you have no idea what your reader will make of your work. More importantly, it foreshadows the ending.

After devotedly drooling over his writing, I didn’t get the ending when I reached the last page. I sat on my couch in the living room, puzzled, trying to piece through it, flipping back and forth between pages to see if I missed something. Then I walked away and grabbed a glass of water and stood staring out the back window into the dark of the night, mulling it over. I took a sip—and nearly spat it out when I realized what le Tellier had done. He created a literary anomaly—a moment where every reader would have to interpret the ending and its meaning, splitting off the book into as many worlds as there are readers.

It was genius, in my opinion, assuming I interpreted that correctly—but then again, it’s my anomaly to interpret.

The ending to that book was so good I wanted to throw it across the room out of professional envy. It was like getting a glimpse of what was possible, and knowing that I may not reach that level of skill in this lifetime.

There was no one truth at which that story arrived. No final ending. There are as many truths or endings to that story as there are readers.

Whether le Tellier was making a philosophical point about subjective truth and story or whether he was just writing a very good novel, I don’t know. But I think his approach is closer to the truth of story than a prescribed ending.

We hear stories according to what we might expect, or want to hear, or according to what we need, or want to feel. Have you ever told a story to a friend, only to have it parroted back to you months or years later with completely different details, or the emphasis on the wrong point, or a wildly different meaning? Or have you ever heard that same story told in a way that paints you in a way you never imagined (for better or worse)? That’s the truth of story. Once the story leaves our lips, our minds, our fingertips, it is no longer ours.

It reminds me of the moment that Elizabeth Gilbert describes in Big Magic where she was at an author event signing books, and a woman hung back from the crowd, clearly waiting to talk to her after everyone else had left. When she finally approached Gilbert, the woman told her that this one book Gilbert had written had changed her life, and referenced the scene with the cow and what it meant to her, and that she had divorced her husband as a result of that book, and made other major life-changing decisions. And as the woman talks, Gilbert thinks to herself that she has no idea what she’s talking about, that that scene with the cow didn’t happen in her book, but this woman sincerely believes this and has based her life on it and to tell her otherwise is to potentially crush her. Gilbert realizes that once the story has left you, it is not yours anymore, and people will make whatever meaning and take whatever detail from the telling of it that they want.

I have just done exactly that.

I have no idea whether Gilbert tells this story the way I’ve told it. I’ve almost certainly moved details, softened some, sharpened others, unconsciously shaped it toward the point I’m making. I’ve made it mine. Which is the whole point—and now it’s yours to do with as you will.

So here is what I want you to notice: every story, once told, becomes unstable. Truthfully, every story is always unstable. There is no version of any story that is the version—not Gilbert’s, not le Tellier’s, not the one you have been telling about yourself.

That story you carry (the one that doesn’t heal, that clogs up the memory and stiffens the body every time it surfaces) you have been treating it as fact, as the only ending. But it is only one telling worn smooth by repetition, grooved so deep it feels natural. It isn’t any more natural than any other version. It’s just the version that survived.

Which means the ending is not fixed.

This might be irritating or frustrating, but what if we took this truth and used it to our own benefit?

What if we took that one story, wrote it down, then tucked it away. And then what if we wrote ten alternate endings for that story, even though we know the ending we’ve told or ruminated over dozens or thousands of times? What if we write something new, and something new again, and something new again, moving all the way past the predictable alternative endings until we reach the endings that are surprising even to us, that “make no sense” but have some kind of magical pull, that leave us thinking about how life would be if that really were the ending of the story.

You’re not rewriting history. You are not falsifying anything. You are doing what every reader does, what every storyteller does. You’re discovering that history was never as fixed as the telling made it feel.