The dinner everyone remembers differently

A friend in Beirut hosts a dinner for eight, and the main dish goes wrong. The lamb is late, then slightly tough, and the rice waits too long beside it.

Ask the host about that evening a month later and the story is about the lamb. The panic in the kitchen, the apologies, the moment she knew it would not come right. She is at the centre of it, because she was.

Ask the guests and the evening is something else. One remembers the long wait as the best part, because it was when the conversation finally opened up. Another remembers the bread and the dips, which kept coming. A third remembers nothing about the food at all, only that it was the first time in months the whole group had been in one room.

Nobody is lying. Each person was there, and each person's version is true. The host's version is simply her own, told from where she stood, with her nerves in the foreground and everyone else's evening in the background.

The stories we keep about things that happened to us are not records. They are narratives, and we are always the one telling them.

That does not make them wrong. It does make them choices, and choices can be examined. The question is not whether her account is accurate. It is whether it is useful. Does it make her want to host again, or make her dread it?

And if it is the second, there are at least seven other versions of the same evening available, and every one of them is also true.