One night during the summer of 1967, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in the front yard of my uncle’s house in Louisiana. Like my father, my Uncle Paul was a dentist, and on the night that the cross was lit, he was not actually at home, but had gone back downtown to his dental office, presumably to pull a tooth for someone in pain who had called him up after hours. His second wife, my beloved aunt Donna—who happened to be 27 years old to his 49—was around eight months pregnant at the time and already in her nightgown; it was dark by now, although it was not terribly late.

The windows in my aunt’s and uncle’s room were hung with red draperies, and my aunt recalls sitting in bed (swollen, probably beset with bedtime requests from the five-year old she already had by her first husband, a man who would later die in an automobile accident) and suddenly noticing an orange glow begin to flare behind the crimson fabric. She got herself out of bed and out into the yard, the five-year-old trailing along behind, and struggled to put the fire out with the garden hose until Uncle Paul pulled into the driveway, probably in one of the big old Cadillac Fleetwoods he drove back then. Together, they got the fire put out and went on to bed—more annoyed than frightened, really.

The reason that the Klan had targeted my uncle had to do with the fact that his maid had participated in a civil rights march. The Grand Kleagle, or whoever it was, called up my uncle and said that if he knew what was good for him, he’d figure out how to keep his maid under control. My uncle replied that he didn’t care what the maid did on her own time as long as she kept the house clean. So that night he came home and found the cross on fire in his yard, although its symbolic effect ended up being somewhat less than the Klan must have hoped: Uncle Paul dried out the blackened cross, shellacked it, and put it up in his garage, where it hung for the next thirty years, along with a defused torpedo that he got from who knew where else.

Although this story does not concern me directly, it is truly one of the “foundational narratives” whereby I have understood my life and myself. I loved the story: its beginning, its middle, its end, the way that it offered a ready template not only to be racially progressive but also to simply be a rebel: My Uncle Paul told off the Klan! Add to that the irresistible, attractive images of the aging, just slightly dissolute dentist (raised a teetotaler and Baptist, he was the kind of man who would keep a silver hip flask under the front seat of the car) and his beautiful pregnant wife, with her masses of auburn hair looped up in a French twist on top of her head. Even now, I can imagine the low heaviness of the summer night, cicadas echoing through the loblolly pines, the sharp cut of the headlight beams as the Fleetwood turned into the white-shell driveway.

All of you can imagine how perfect the cinematography would be. But I tell this story now less in recollection than as a cautionary tale about the misuse of the power of narrative—the stock in which all of us trade, whether as novelists, reviewers, teachers, or simply readers. We use narrative to impose meaning upon seemingly random, disparate facts and events, as the writer Joan Didion famously said.

But the demand to create—quickly—an easily manageable narrative of all events has the effect of reducing human experience to shorthand, human beings to material products, and political life to a film plot. Think motivational courses in “personal branding.” Think Neal Gabler’s 1998 book Life: The Movie. And as you all know, so much of contemporary fiction can be summed up by the demographic niche to which it is targeted, or as a series of plot points.

I always loved the story about my uncle, I said above, because of its economical elegance, my uncle as hero, two lives briefly illuminated with light. I loved much less the picture of my aunt’s and uncle’s divorce after twenty years of marriage, and my slow drift away from them both, until my uncle died in 2001. I imagined to myself that that night in 1967 was who my aunt and uncle truly “were,” and who they were now were only aberrations, unexplainable. In looking back to worship the narrative of their past, I had coldly held off from loving them in the present—their altered lives every bit as much as ever the icons of Incarnation. That was my faithlessness, that was my betrayal.

I’ll call Aunt Donna tonight.