The limits of narrative control: "Kirkland" by Sarah Anderson (Best American Short Stories 2025)

If you've ever dabbled in cognitive therapy, you've probably encountered this adage from Epictetus that is thousands of years old: "Men are disturbed not by things, but the views which they take of them." There's a lot of truth in it, and the idea, as well as cognitive therapy in general, are fairly empowering. It's a philosophy that gives a lot of agency to its adherents. I might not be able to control what happens, but I can control how I react to it. Many people probably live happy lives thinking this way.

The problem is that sometimes, events happen that are so powerfully damaging, they stretch the ability to control them through our thoughts to and past the breaking point. For example, if a fascist leader sends you to a concentration camp, there's not much agency you can obtain by trying to re-cast your detainment into your own narrative. That's why the movie La Vita e Bella, as much as it was loved, is probably the stupidest movie I've ever seen. It is a maximally "the story you tell yourself controls your destiny" type of movie. When the main character and his son are sent to a concentration camp, the main character manages to save his son by convincing him it's all a survival game. If this were actually the world we lived in, then life really would be beautiful, as the title of the movie suggests.

A would-be Roberto Benigni tells herself stories

The unnamed narrator of "Kirkland" (N from here on) seems to be a devotee of Epictetus, whether she's aware of it or not. Or maybe she's influenced by the school of La Vita e Bella and thinks that life can be whatever we imagine it to be. She's not too fussy about separating fact from fiction. If a story makes her happy, she runs with it. The most obvious example is Kirkland, the name of all Costco-brand products. N thinks it's a real place, and she imagines it as an isthmus full of abundance. (Fun fact: N is right that Kirkland is a real place. It's a city in Washington, the former headquarters of Costco, and it very nearly, but not quite, qualifies as an isthmus, as it's along the shores of Lake Washington and does bump into the lake ever so slightly. So N is almost right, even if it's for the wrong reasons.)

 

Other mistaken beliefs that N holds include thinking Jon Bon Jovi's full name is Bon Jovi. (I think a lot of 80s kids had that mistaken belief.) She mispronounces words like "soldering." Her parents do not bother to disabuse her of her fantasies. Maybe they think that if these things make her happy, there's no need to let inconvenient facts ruin her enjoyable world. 

One person happy to tell her she's wrong is her boyfriend Damian, her possibly-statutory-rapist-depending-on-the-laws-of-the-state, four-years-older-than-the-seventeen-year-old narrator, boyfriend. The story opens with him telling N that she doesn't know how the real world works. He's a total knob, but he's probably not completely mistaken about that assessment. 

N actually brags to herself about her ability to control how she feels based on what she tells herself. At one point, she claims that, “You can make yourself fall in and out of love with people pretty easily, I’ve found, if you have a strong sense of narrative arc and choose the right moments.” She does this with Damian. When she needs to love him less, she thinks of his many bad qualities. When she needs to love him more, she focuses on his few good ones. 

Later on, she makes a similar, though broader claim: 

“One good thing about me is that I’m extremely adaptable. I can adjust to new circumstances before they even happen. When I start to sense a person pulling away from me, I immediately imagine my life without them. The hobbies and TV shows I could use to fill the time left by their absence. I could take up fencing and win a scholarship to a fancy college, my breasts smushed into hard white pancakes. I could commit to watching every episode of The Sopranos so people could finally stop telling me, “You should really watch The Sopranos.” I could become a dowser, follow my quivering rod for miles and miles until it led me to an oasis in the middle of the desert that only I knew about. I would bend down, cup my hands, and drink.”

She thinks, in other words, that if her life starts to go one way or the other, she can adapt to it by convincing herself that she's fine with whatever way it goes.  

The limits of N's control

So N thinks she's in control of her own mind by virtue of the stories she tells herself. But a trauma is about to strike that will test the limits of what she can control through her inner life. 

In fact, there are chinks in her narrative armor long before Chloe goes missing. She recalls a teacher she had in second grade, Ms. Klein, who was fired for conducing an experiment that taught the kids too tough of a life lesson. For N, this year in second grade was about her best introduction to "the real world." The class carried out a year long economic experiment resembling uncontrolled capitalism, one that ended up creating a lower class of "homeless" students who lost their desks and had to work on the floor. N's father doesn't object to the experiment, thinking of it as the "school of hard knocks." N struggles, but eventually comes out on top of the experiment, while Chloe simply refuses to compete, happily living out her life on the floor. 

Ms. Klein also helps N learn the value of "facts," the real-world antithesis of the fantasies that N creates inside her head in order to exact control over the world. Ms. Klein has lied to all of the children, saying that if they all have her over to their house for dinner, she will bring them to see her ostrich farm. N spends the year learning facts about ostriches. Among those facts are that the common myth about ostriches--that they bury their heads in the sand in order to avoid having to see things they don't want to see--isn't true. Even ostriches don't just see what they want to see. 

N finds, during the stressful meal when Ms. Klein comes to dinner, that reciting the facts actually helps to keep her calm. So she tells herself fantasies to achieve mental control over the real world, but also, simply acknowledging real things has a similar effect. So what superiority does her fantasy world have?

N's attempts to use mind over matter fail her, in fact, when Chloe goes missing. She tries to think of the things about Chloe she didn't like, so her disappearance won't affect her so much, but N finds she can only think of the good things, including some of the quasi-erotic thoughts she's had about Chloe. 

The union of fact and fantasy as a possible system of control

Dad has an interesting theory about human nature that he shares when Ms. Klein is over for dinner. He thinks all people can be plotted on a grid consisting of four elements. First, they are all either hard or soft. Second, they are all either "lizard" or "mouse." We don't get an explanation of these categories, but we can maybe guess their rough meanings. This charting of human nature seems to be how Dad exerts his control over the world, by creating a theory and applying it. It's a facts-based approach, but one that involves a creative analysis of the facts to put them into a pattern. Maybe his theory actually provides us, the readers, with a key to resolving the tension between fact-first and fantasy-first mentalities as the best way to deal with highly destabilizing events. 

Whatever these things mean, it's probably something like this: A lizard is a hunter, while a mouse is a hider/avoider. A hard lizard is a strong type-A personality, while a soft lizard might occasionally relent from trying to take the world by the throat. A soft mouse (Chloe?) might live eternally in fantasy land, while a hard mouse might lean toward fantasy but be able to accept cold, hard facts when necessary. When it comes to the choice between applying "real world" logic or "fantasy Kirkland" logic, maybe the strongest people will be those who combine contrasting categories. A soft lizard or a hard mouse, let's say. 

That is to say, it's best to find some union between fantasy and fact. Both can offer comfort. Both can help us to find some level of control over an uncontrollable world. Facts give us science, with its ability to control the natural world and bring about better outcomes. Fiction gives us the ability to at least try to cope with the disasters that we cannot avoid through our use of facts. If you're naturally a mouse (given to fantasy, let's say, like N), it's good to mix in a little fact, to be a hard mouse. If you're a natural lizard, like Damian with his command of the number of grams of protein in a Costco hot dog, maybe you could use a little softening. Dad might be a good mix, since he both uses his rational mind and isn't opposed to the "school of hard knocks," but he also sees no reason to correct his daughter's fantasies. 

There are two examples of N seeking this union between fact and fiction. One is her predilection for magazines like Cosmo, which are a blend of factoids and the fantasies of glamor and beauty they sell. The other is in her brother Raymond. When N finds that her ability to control her thoughts through self-will fails her, she looks to Raymond. Raymond has been working on and off for years on a documentary about an alien abduction that happened to kids in Zimbabwe. Many of those kids, unable to deal with the trauma of what took place, have taken to drugs and gone crazy. Raymond isn't sure he believes them, but he's sure that "something happened." Raymond, by making a documentary (non-fiction) about a strange and probably fictional event, is trying to make fact and fantasy go together.  

The same is true of Chloe's mysterious disappearance. Something, of course, happened. But what? The children in Raymond's documentary don't have facts, and the (likely) fiction they've created of an alien abduction isn't comforting. There was very likely some traumatic event, but they aren't able to come to grips with it, either with facts or with a story. 

That's exactly where N is with Chloe. She and Chloe had been drifting apart late in high school, but N was the last person Chloe reached out to before she went missing. N, miffed at Chloe for getting a tattoo without her, didn't answer, so now she has to live the rest of her life wondering if she would have known what happened to Chloe if she had just answered the phone. She doesn't even get the closure of a tragic event, like Chloe dying in a car accident. She gets complete open-endedness. 

 That tattoo was of a ghost. N had been wanting to get her first tattoo with Chloe. N's dream tattoo was of a stylish ghost, not a Halloween spooky ghost, along with the words "give up the ghost." She likes that phrase because it's a strange way to say "die," because it has a long history going back to the King James Bible, and because it can also refer to machines. It is, in other words, a good blend of fact and fiction, of the real world and fantasy. As a tattoo at age eighteen, it would have represented a permanent mark of the philosophy N had brought with her out of childhood, her merger of the two worlds she had struggled to bring together. But Chloe wasn't there to share it with her. 

N finds herself casting about looking for a story to make sense of Chloe's disappearance. She has no facts, so she can only resort to fiction. It's just like when the beloved class pet duck Coco died. She just wanted answers about why, but none were available. As a child, N pretended that Coco had gone to Kirkland, which in that version was kind of like Heaven. She toys with that possibility with Chloe, but ultimately doesn't stick with it. She imagines Chloe being trafficked for sex, or that she is waitressing at a steakhouse by the beach. 

The final fantasy N applies to Chloe is that she never really left, and that she is living at her teacher's made-up ostrich farm. The ostriches were N's introduction to the power of fact, even though the farm itself was a fantasy. One of the things N learned about ostriches was that they were not powerless. They could kill you with a single kick. Ostriches that didn't exist taught N something about our unexpected power and agency. 

She imagines Chloe trying to find a way to "grow teeth," that is, to obtain the ability to defend herself. It's a wish for the powers of fantasy and fact to combine, for Chloe to become a hard mouse, for Chloe's story not to end with her as a victim, but finding a way to fight back. Absent any knowledge of what happened, it's the only power N can imagine. 

Other analysis: Karen Carlson's take on this story is available here.