The story gap

THE STORY

GAP by Freya Berry (2010)

Humans love stories. We can’t help ourselves: we are suckers for anecdotes, gossip, tales. Studies have shown that if we are told information in the form of narrative, we will retain it better than if just presented with facts and figures. Likewise, if presented with an object for sale, we will ascribe that object a higher value if it comes with a story attached.

People in power know well how to exploit this. It was Imelda Marcos who said, ‘Perception is real, and the truth is not.’ Subjectivity, not objectivity. Stories, not facts. Taking back control. Making a nation great again. We like to think we are objective, rational creatures, making logical decisions based on evidence, and this very belief makes it all the more easy for us to be manipulated.

I wanted to explore this in my novel The Dictator’s Wife, which was published in February. Set in post-Cold War eastern Europe, it follows a captivating tyrant’s wife standing trial for her dead husband’s crimes. I had been a reporter on the 2016 US election and began writing it directly afterwards, with the establishment still reeling in shock at the result. They – we – had been telling the wrong story all along.

To create my dictator’s wife, I drew on real-life figures. It is interesting that many first ladies know first-hand how to shape a story, or at least how to exist in someone else’s. Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, was an actress, as was Evita; Rosario Murillo, wife of Daniel Ortega, was a poet. Carrie Johnson was a press officer; Melania Trump, a model. Women have so long been the walk-on parts in men’s stories; the clever ones are able to weaponize this. My own character, Marija Popa, is in her early sixties, a glamorous shapeshifter and master PR woman. I wanted the reader to be constantly asking – is she innocent, or is she complicit? Has she softened her husband, or has she whitewashed him? Is she, one character asks rhetorically, the kind of woman who launders clothes or the kind that launders money?

Ambiguity clings still to the roles of women and the spaces we leave for them: the gap between tradition and modern progress lingers on. Like Imelda Marcos in her 1990 New York trial, Marija protests that she is only a housewife, a mere woman who knew nothing of her husband’s activities. Yet at the same time, she is known to be the power behind the regime. ‘The Little Mother had the curious double-sidedness of a

“To create my dictator’s wife, I drew on real-life figures. It is interesting that many first ladies know first-hand how to shape a story, or at least how to exist in someone else’s.

Rubin vase,’ her female defence lawyer says. ‘You could perceive one image, or another, but trying to see both at the same time made your head spin.’

It is the same feeling I have when looking at, say, Melania Trump. How could we seek to #FreeMelania when this very woman wore that notorious Zara jacket? How can we condemn Carrie Johnson for her presence at Downing Street parties and alleged sway over her husband when she has just given birth? Rightly or wrongly, women are still perceived as being closer to home, in every sense. We are kept inseparable from our bodies and their functions, which is both a strength and a weakness.

I was a journalist at Reuters before I ever thought of writing a novel. Our lives are the tales we tell ourselves, my lawyer character remarks, but they are also the tales we tell to other people; and some of us manage our PR better than others. As a journalist I interviewed dozens of bankers, CEOs and billionaires. It was an education in dissimulation. The charming mining executive who was busily infringing human rights in east Asia. The bankers who blithely talked of ‘synergies’ their clients could extract from mergers and acquisitions, which I quickly learned meant firing people. And best of all, the women in business, like rare and exotic birds, if birds had immaculate blow-dries, every one of them as tough as their perfect nails. They had to be. I had the sense that the men just were, whoever they happened to be; the women had to perform characterised versions of themselves. It was from them that I began to gather a sense of the charade that is womanhood, a seed that was planted in sessions with my Cambridge tutors reading Jane Austen. ‘I cannot get out, as the starling said,’ quotes Maria in Mansfield Park, staring through the iron gates. Women are far more beholden to stories than men, because the roles available are so few, and therefore all the more distinctive. Maiden, mother, crone, goes the old saying. First Lady – a patronising label nonetheless reminiscent of Eve.

In The Dictator’s Wife, I sought to create a character who would grab such roles by the neck and shake them until whatever she wanted fell out. It occurred to me during my research that the last time I read about a woman so hellbent on gaining power, the person in question was Lady Macbeth – and we all know how that turned out. ‘Unsex me,’ she wisely asks, when preparing to commit her crimes. To be a woman is to have one’s hands tied.

There are currently only 14 countries led by women, and last year perhaps the most famous female leader, Angela Merkel, stepped down after sixteen years. ‘Mutti’, the Germans called her. Mother. Would we pigeonhole a man so neatly, no matter how warmly the label is intended? To return to Imelda Marcos for a moment: ‘The problem with First Ladies is that you have to set the standard. My role is to be both star and slave.’ I hope that we are gaining the imagination to create other roles for women – or, better still, to allow them to create them for themselves.

The Dictator’s Wife is out now with Headline Review. Available here bit.ly/3KHstWp or in all good bookstores. @freyabbooks @freyabbooks