{"id":85107,"date":"2015-04-23T18:05:46","date_gmt":"2015-04-23T22:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=85107"},"modified":"2015-04-23T18:05:46","modified_gmt":"2015-04-23T22:05:46","slug":"and-i-was-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/23\/and-i-was-like\/","title":{"rendered":"And I Was Like\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"
\""portrait<\/a>

Gert Germeraad, Portrait of a Man<\/i>, 2010.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cGET THE HELL OUT OF MY FACE!\u201d the woman screamed. My companion and I both turned around in alarm as we all mounted the escalator to the movie theater.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, sorry! Not you!\u201d she apologized hurriedly. \u201cI was just telling a story to my friend! That was something I said!\u201d<\/p>\n

In the week since, I have overheard several such monologues. One was a teen girl, vehement, on her cell. \u201cI was just like, you do not<\/em> speak to me that way,\u201d she asserted. Then a guy on his lunch break was relating to his friend, \u201cI was all, I am not <\/em>the guy you want to mess with, pal.\u201d <\/p>\n

There must be an aspect of exaggeration here; it\u2019s not as if, in day-to-day life, we regularly witness the kind of dialogue these storytellers describe. I\u2019ve started to wonder how accurate these retellings are, and how docile the actual conversations were in comparison. I\u2019m guessing these narrators really said something more along the lines of \u201cSure,\u201d or, \u201cYeah,\u201d or maybe, \u201cOkay.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the telling, everyone\u2019s an assertive, brave little tailor, slaying giants and jerks with impunity and disregard for the social contract. And in fairness, \u201cI was like\u201d is a construction well suited to ambiguity. No one is claiming to have said<\/em> anything in particular. What we\u2019re conveying with \u201cI was like\u201d is a momentary ethos, an id, a subjective reality. We all do it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And as listeners, we all understand this. No one takes these accounts literally; in such a moment, someone is venting, and requires nothing but commiseration. People don\u2019t seem to worry much about the chagrin of l\u2019esprit d\u2019escalier<\/em>; why waste time castigating yourself about missed opportunities when you can just tell everyone the story as you wish it had happened?<\/p>\n

The truth is, faithful accounts of most interactions, unleavened by an indignant internal monologue, would be pretty dull. And conversely, any person who actually lived life as we all claim to live it would be crazy.<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cGET THE HELL OUT OF MY FACE!\u201d the woman screamed. My companion and I both turned around in alarm as we all mounted the escalator to the movie theater. \u201cOh, sorry! Not you!\u201d she apologized hurriedly. \u201cI was just telling a story to my friend! That was something I said!\u201d In the week since, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[13861,12511,1687,17897,17898,7931,17896,10438],"class_list":["post-85107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-anger","tag-city-life","tag-dialogue","tag-i-was-like","tag-interactions","tag-lying","tag-oral-storytelling","tag-storytelling"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cAnd I Was Like...\u201d Exaggeration in Storytelling<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on the small lies we tell when we recount events, and why they\u2019re okay.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/23\/and-i-was-like\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"And I Was Like\u2026 by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 23, 2015 \u2013 \u201cGET THE HELL OUT OF MY FACE!\u201d the woman screamed. 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