Stories too Powerful to Make Up

This is the line that jumps out of the middle for me about Six Sex Scenes. The language of the piece is so simplistic in its syntax and word choice that I begin to take it as a mere recounting of facts rather than a work of fiction, something that I can't really be sure of.

Diving in from the opening page, I get the impression that just that is happening: I am diving into a body of water made up of numerous disturbing images interwoven with seemingly innocuous (at least by comparison) reminiscence about frequently unpleasant childhood memories or recollections from the narrator’s relationship with Andy. The options offered through which to enter the text are both from the adult perspective of the character, and both are probably significant in their own ways: one, a quick recollection of an evening out with her boyfriend in which she effectively severs herself from him by fantasizing about switching orientations; the other, a therapy session with the two in which their slightly dysfunctional sexual relationship is tempered by the therapist’s assertion that they are relatively healthy. This is the first section I read, and this inevitably informed the rest of the text for me; it feels like a lens through which to view the rest of the piece. I can see, though, that entering through the other section could dramatically alter the reader’s initial perception of the piece.

After this, the reader swims between scenes through the embedded links, all of which remain internal and thus give the feeling of being lost IN something (differing from the Caitlin Fisher piece, in which new page tabs open up with different hyperlinks, thus making it more of a unraveling structure whose contents we can view fairly simultaneously). This creates a stronger sense of fluidity but, in concert with the content of the story itself, contributes to a feeling of being overwhelmed: by the sexuality of her relationships to her boyfriend and her father, and by the mere flow between sections. The “Home” link at the end of each line at the bottom permits the reader to exit at any time and reenter from a different place when ready to do so, but it implies that this is a last resort. Even when I reached the end of a thread, leaving me with this as my only option, I was left thinking I ought to backtrack instead, as one inevitably has to do in order to absorb the whole of the piece. Certain links are only available from certain pages, which requires a reader to eventually repeat pages in order to locate everything. I noticed early that a page suggesting an “Introduction” was lost in the middle, offering the possibility to make sense of the muddle the author creates in our minds, perhaps a means of organizing the images or disclaiming the assertions made in particular about her childhood relationship with her father. I found myself waiting to come back to this page hoping that this was the case. The “Introduction,” though, was in fact her meeting with Andy and thus more a transition between the dual worlds in the piece. So at the end I am left wondering about a comment made by the lady who does her family’s laundry when she is a girl, that stories are simply too powerful to make up. And attempting to apply this casual assertion to the whole of the piece, leaving me with the question: is this the narrator or a character talking? Is this piece fictional slices of a dysfunctional character or a life whose content is too powerful to make up?