“It’s true,” she said. “Hannah Montana is thinking of leaving the show.”
I scratched my head, playing the devil’s advocate of absurdity: “Wait. But you said her real name is Destiny Hope Cyrus, but she changed it legally to Miley, the name of the character on the show. Now she wants to change her name to Hannah Montana. But she plays Miley on the show. . . and Hannah.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So, she is making her fictional character, in a way, factual. BUT . . . she’s killing the fictional character by leaving the show. She became the fiction and is now leaving.”
“No,” she said. “Quit making this more than it is. She just wanted to change her name and then she wants to quit the show and do other things.”
“. . . but as Miley or as Hannah? Which fiction will she choose?” I felt I was learning a great deal.
“She’s worried that no one will care who she is if she’s not the blond Hannah Montana.” She took a sip of her tea.
“So to make people care she becomes the fiction,” I repeated.
“I know, it’s dumb,” she said. “It’s no big deal, really.”
Right, I thought and later said, mixing up fact and fiction is no big deal.
After all, what is the line between fact and fiction? A future student of mine posted an idea similar to this on my AP discussion boards, asking if a fictional novel’s purpose is the same as a persuasive essay’s purpose. Essays argue through use of fictional allegories and themes; novels are thematic and often allegorical. Texts persuade, and they all do it through symbols and language.
So at what point does Billy Ray Cyrus’—apparently really his true birth name, but he changed the name of “Achy Breaky Heart” from its original “Don’t Tell My Heart, so he is hardly guiltless—daughter lose her true identity to the Disney persona created for her? (…though I empathize with a desire to abandon a name like “Destiny Hope.”)
Imagine: Disney makes a show about you, using your name, with the premise that you have an alter ego. Then you grow to love the character and change yourself into it. At this point, we have to wonder: is she fact or fiction? How do we know about the status of anything? News stories, novels, people, blogs?
But don’t worry—some women redesign themselves into Barbie dolls; and Barbie redesigns herself to be more real. Even so,Barbie will sue any doll which is more real and thus more popular than she is. We’re just keepin’ this real.
“Maybe it doesn’t make any difference,” I said at last. “We all just live our own fictions, anyway, so all the-person-named-Miley is doing is putting hers out front.”
“Exactly,” she said dubiously.
“She doesn’t front; she represents,” I added. “. . . unlike the ‘Artist-formerly-known-as-Prince’ or the ‘Symbol.’”
Of course, by this time, I was laughing so hard at the story that she was becoming irate and dismissive. “Oh, just stop it. Why do I try to talk with you about anything?”
We all live lives of symbols, each a fiction designed to please or harass us. If we’re lucky, we have some choice over how we arrange them. If we’re not, we become victims of the realities thrown at us:
miley iam so sad becase u are quiting hannah montana i hate it no one could be the best hannah montana but u ok i mean it if u quit go a head i might be the next HANNAH MONTANA ok please talk to me again (Houston Forum)
My AP student is right to ask: it’s not that an essay or novel is fiction or fact but that the themes, the arrangements of symbols into meanings we desire, are all we have in any event—and everything we have. In this sense, Hannah Montana and Jay Gatsby and Barack Obama all deliver the same lessons:
But what hurts the most
Is you can’t tell me
Something
Without telling a lie
Oh quit telling lies
You’re making me
Making me cry
It’s Destiny.
Steve Chisnell (um, on the right) is a teacher at Royal Oak (MI) High School. 
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