I had a dream last night that that exact thing happened to one of my favorite mystery novel detectives, Hercule Poirot. Poirot found himself in a library of vintage books of various shapes and sizes. As he read the titles, he commented that he didn’t recognize any of them. That was when the other person in the room explained that these were all part of a never-before-seen collection of books that had been discovered in the author’s estate upon her death. Poirot asked what they were about, and the other person said, “You. All of them are about you.”
“Me?” Poirot gasped in surprise. “How can they be about me?”
“Because you’re a character from a book, something that someone thought up and brought to life on paper. There are other stories about you that many people have read.”
“Mon Dieu!” he exclaimed as the reality hit him. He stood staring at the spines of the book, his little grey cells working to process this information. He began to walk down the shelves, his gloved hand gliding gently along the titles. And then he began to cry. “I am not me. It is no longer my voice. It has been given to everyone to speak for me. And they thought so little of me that they didn’t even care to speak these stories for me.”
We all stood in silence, watching the great detective as he covered his face and sobbed uncontrollably. His entire life a lie.
