Promise Me You Won’t Believe A Single Word

“I’m the best liar in the world. Promise me you won’t believe a single word,” says a grandmother to her granddaughter in The Faery Handbag, a short story by Kelly Link, my favorite author. In the story, a hand-me-down handbag becomes the starting point for a series of magical tales from the grandmother’s past, with meanings for the granddaughter’s present and future. Evidence abounds that the incredible memoirs are, in fact, true; but the world of The Fairy Handbag is all cast in the light of the grandmother’s repeated demand to her granddaughter, “promise me you won’t believe a single word.”

The Faery Handbag asks powerful questions about how we perceive our past and our loved ones. Lovingly yet ruthlessly, Link examines how the unreliable stories of our parents and grandparents are often the only link we have to our histories, and when those people are gone, the lines between truth and fiction only become more blurred. I was inspired by this story from the first time I encountered it, during my doctoral study. A few years later, I approached my friend and colleague Tyler White about writing for his orchestra at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and in the fall of 2018, I started work on this piece.

Promise Me You Won’t Believe A Single Word starts with a musical “question,” asked by the oboe and clarinet. A series of fantasies on the musical question follow, each posing an answer in the form of either a “truth,” a “riddle,” or a “lie.” The emotional final act of the piece — which I called “Truth 3” while I was composing — is followed by one more iteration of the question. In my view of the piece’s narrative, it’s unclear whether any of the answers, even the sections of “truth,” were ever real. Promise Me You Won’t Believe A Single Word is a meditation on family, truth, and love. It questions how deeply we can ever trust what we hear, even from those closest to us; and it explores those things that, in the end, may be more important than the truth.

On December 6, 2018, as I was writing this piece, my own grandmother passed away, thousands of miles apart from me. Promise Me You Won’t Believe A Single Word is dedicated with love to Kela — te quiero para siempre.