On Writing A VERSION OF THE TRUTH by Marsh Rose

A Version Of the Truth follows one woman’s story as she faces the end of a relationship and a mystery that will never be solved.

The story is mine.

As that experience evolved in real time, I wrote about it. It’s what we do, those of us who keep a journal. I’ve kept one for over fifty years, and its presence is a cornerstone of my life. In fact, for some of us (like me), sometimes it feels as though we haven’t fully had an experience until we’ve written about it.

While my public writing has been in the form of creative nonfiction for short stories and magazines, I don’t mine my journal for material. My journal writing isn’t meant to be shared, not even with friends and certainly never to be published. It’s private, and I have a certain way that I write in my journal, a voice, so to speak. But as this experience continued to develop, I knew it needed to be written in a different way. I felt there was something in this experience that might be useful to others. It was this: Most of us at one time or another face the unknown. How do we make peace with this reality in a world that tells us we can have all the information we crave? If our traditional resources don’t deliver – our elders, our professors, our spiritual leaders – then we have Google and AI. But what do we do when we want the truth and we can’t have it?

I found my path forward. Could I write it as a memoir?

The idea demanded that I stay present and aware of my own process, but in a constructive way. It’s difficult to stop thinking about something when it demands to be noticed and then, once noticed, going to the word processor for another paragraph, another page, another hour or three gone. I needed to practice mindfulness, stay aware of my physical and emotional and spiritual needs as well as my, so to speak, writing need. Oh sure, I escaped into the occasional bout of TV binging. In fact, although I’m usually too squeamish to watch “Grey’s Anatomy” even though I know it’s not real gore, I made it through four seasons in two months! 

Although the experience had left me feeling traumatized, I knew I was not suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. As a psychotherapist, I had been treating PTSD since before it had a formal name. Back then, we called it “combat trauma.” It took several decades for science to acknowledge that the illness can affect survivors of all forms of trauma, not only veterans. (Actually, acknowledgment took over a century after PTSD was first noticed in incest survivors in the early 1900s, but that’s a whole different story.) While my sleep was certainly affected, and my moods were all over the map, calling myself a PTSD sufferer would do a disservice to the many survivors of child abuse, domestic violence, combat and crime who do have that illness. And yet, I felt my experience gave me a story that, this time, I wanted to share with others.

I would also be, so to speak, sharing it with myself. In other words, reading it again in the future. It’s something I learned the hard way. Until recently, I would never read my journals. They just piled up along the back wall of a closet, unopened once they were closed. Why rummage around in what used to be? And then one wintry day, with a northern California monsoon gushing down, just for some light entertainment I decided to open a journal from years ago and read about an embarrassing experience in Alaska. I had made a fool of myself over a man, as so many young people do. I was naïve, that’s all. So I opened that journal from years ago… and scared the daylights out of myself.

My memory of that incident was not what had happened! More than a silly post-adolescent fling, I had crossed paths with a dangerous narcissist and had put myself at risk for harm…or worse. Over time I had rewritten the story in my mind, a supreme act of denial to avoid acknowledging how reckless I had been. Once I got over the shock, I vowed to use my journal more often as a reality check. I would do that with this experience as well. That realization prompted me to pay special attention to what I was writing about it. (Scaring myself did have some benefit in the long run. The story about freaking myself out by reading my journal, “False Memory,” was awarded first prize for creative nonfiction from New Millennium Writings in 2018.)

Losing a long-term relationship and being faced with a mystery will have echoing, long-term effects. I’m still realizing them, and the gifts they offer, and the ways in which this experience gave me a new way to approach writing.

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A VERSION OF THE TRUTH

Over forty years, Marsh and her partner built a life defined by love, devotion, and independence. He supported her when she bought her home in California wine country, when she grieved the deaths of her parents, when she built her career as a psychotherapist, and even when she overcame a lifelong fear of dogs to adopt a rescued greyhound.

They never married or shared a home—by choice. They were lovers and confidants, deeply committed to one another. Yet, they only met on Tuesdays and Fridays.

And then, one day, he vanished.

When Marsh finally tracked him down, she discovered the unimaginable: he had suffered a catastrophic stroke. His memory was gone. He could no longer speak. And he was living with a woman who knew him by a different name.

What was the truth? With him unreachable behind the devastation of his illness, and with the danger that exposing their relationship could cause irreparable harm, Marsh was left to confront a hall of mirrors—plagued by questions, silences, and uncertainty.

In the end, she discovered a universal reality: we all live with some unknowable mystery. The question is—do we spend our lives searching in vain for an answer, or do we find a version of the truth we can live with, and live with it?

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Marsh Rose is an author, freelance writer and psychotherapist. Her preferred genre is memoir and creative nonfiction, and her short stories and essays have appeared in a variety of publications including Cosmopolitan Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon and Carve Magazine among others. Her essay, “False Memory,” won first prize for creative nonfiction from New Millennium Writings in 2018 and she was a winner in Tulip Tree’s “Wild Women” contest, June/July 2025, for her essay “Dinosaur Rock.” She has also authored two novels, Lies and Love in Alaska and Escape Routes. Marsh began her writing life at the age of 14 as a cub reporter in Massachusetts, changed careers when she became a licensed psychotherapist in 1992, and now divides her time among writing, her on-line psychotherapy practice, and her passion for rescuing racing greyhounds. She lives in the wine country in northern California with her greyhound, Adin. 

https://www.marshroseauthor.com/.

 

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Category: On Writing