David McElroy

How can I miss a life I’ve never known? How can I long for someone I’ve never touched? And how can I love little people who don’t even exist?

I’ve awakened from a dream again — around 4 a.m. — and I can’t go back to sleep. I didn’t know where I was when I woke up. My bedroom felt unfamiliar, because I expected to be somewhere else. And then I realized where I was — and that the place I expected was only in the dream.

All my life, I’ve had dreams about a huge and confusing house. I came to understand years ago that my mind uses this as a metaphor for my mind and my life. The house is me. When I was young, I had a lot of dreams about trying to squeeze through a narrow passage under the house. The passage would be narrower and narrower — until I was terrified that I would be stuck there and die.

As an adult, I’ve often dreamed about the house. Sometimes different floors or wings. Or a basement. The layout changes at times. Lately, though, there’s one door I’m always drawn toward — and I know what’s behind the door.

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Do you know what it feels like to be certain that nothing can stop you?

It’s a moment of winning. Time slows down. It’s the sudden feeling that all is right with your world. It’s the certainty that you could do anything in that instant. That nothing could stop you. That you are in such a state of perfect harmony with something in the universe that God is pleased with you.

I live for those moments. I crave those experiences just as much as a junkie needs a hit of his drug. In those rare moments of seeming perfection, I feel as though I am good enough — and that I can do anything.

I felt that way one Saturday morning 15 years ago. I was at a film festival and my short film was about to be shown to an audience for the very first time. It was a large crowd, maybe 500 or so, I suppose. I was nervous. The audience had seemed bored during the films before it. Maybe this was a tough crowd.

And then my film started.

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I was trying to tell a friend about my film idea when I stumbled upon the right title. I casually said something about attempting to tell “the truth about my father” when it struck both of us that I had just spoken the right title.

“The Truth About My Father”

That would be the name of the non-fiction book I would write and then it would be the name of a very fictionalized comedy version that I would make afterward. Why did such a strange tale need to be told as a comedy? I didn’t know then and I still don’t know, but I know it’s a dark comedy.

That was years ago. Ever since then, I’ve struggled to figure out how to make the story work as a film script. Redrawing my father as an exaggerated form of his eccentric self was easy, but the story centered around a son learning the hidden truth about his father. And I figured something out this week.

The story is boring — and it doesn’t work — unless I dig into my own flaws and trace where the worst part of me came from. To tell the truth about my father, I have to dig into — and expose — the worst parts of myself.

And that’s scary.

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