Lynn Johnston on honesty and truth in storytelling

LYNN JOHNSTON: I spoke to Garry Trudeau. I called him up and said, "Well, Garry, now I know just a little bit about what your life is like." He laughed and said, "They've given up on me. They still held out hope that you could be another gag-a-day cartoonist, but they long ago gave up hope on me." He also said that most people don't realize how thoroughly he researches everything he writes about. When he puts something in the paper that is very pointed and of a name-dropping nature, it is not done without hours and hours of thorough research. He said he knows that he has detractors, but he said that he's always confident that he's told the truth as he sees it. He was very comforting, and he said, "If you want to make a statement, you have to make it with all honesty and truth and be comforted knowing that it was made with your own strong sense of values and truth."
TOM HEINTJES: You're handling this sequence so deftly and so honestly, with a perceptiveness that seems so authentic. I'm left wondering if you simply wrote it from out of your imagination.
LYNN JOHNSTON: I didn't. I wrote it from experience. My brother-in-law is gay. It certainly has not been by design, but so very many of my friends have been gay, all the way through school, art school, even in my husband's dental class -ー our very best friend, who graduated with Rod, was gay and is now HIV-positive. He's been thrown out of his home. We've been part of the private lives of so many people who have had to deal with this. I know this story. I know it's a true one, and I know the dialogue by heart.
TOM HEINTJES: That explains why it seemed so palpably real.
LYNN JOHNSTON: It is real. That's why I can stand tall and know that I am not making up a story simply to shock people. I produced a story that is so true that it's painful. You know what it's like? It's like lancing a boil and taking out the thing that won't allow it to heal. Not that I intended to do that, but I had the confidence that I could tell this story from the side of the people who had experience. In that way, I was being very true to myself, my strip and to them. The strip's always been very honest.