Longreads Best of 2013 Postscript: 'The Poorest Rich Kids in the World'

Above: Doris Duke

上图：多丽丝·杜克

## The Poorest Rich Kids in the World

## 世界上最贫穷的富孩子

Sabrina Rubin Erdely | Rolling Stone | August 2013 | 38 minutes (9,653 words)

萨布丽娜·鲁宾·埃尔德利 | Sabrina Rubin Erdely滚石 | 2013 年 8 月 | 38 分钟（9,653 字）

Sabrina Rubin Erdely (@sabrinarerdely) is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone.

Sabrina Rubin Erdely (@sabrinarerdely) 是《滚石》杂志的特约编辑。

I often deal with interview subjects who tell variations of the truth.

我经常遇到那些说出不同真相的采访对象。

People don’t usually out-and-out lie, although that happens from time to time.

人们通常不会彻头彻尾地撒谎，尽管这种情况时有发生。

But memory is a flimsy thing.

但记忆是个脆弱的东西。

Even a clear-eyed subject gets details wrong: The sequence of events is off, a sweater was blue and not green, that sort of thing.

即使是目光敏锐的主体也会弄错细节：事件的顺序不对，毛衣是蓝色而不是绿色，诸如此类。

And then there are those people whose emotions or perspectives have put a filter on their recollections, skewing it this way or that.

还有一些人的情绪或观点对他们的回忆施加了过滤器，使之产生这样或那样的扭曲。

The teenage twins Georgia and Patterson Inman, heirs to the Duke fortune, were like an exponential version of that latter category.

十几岁的双胞胎乔治亚·英曼和帕特森·英曼是杜克大学财产的继承人，他们就像后一类人的指数版本。

Their memories had been so warped by trauma that they actually couldn’t separate fact from fiction.

他们的记忆因创伤而扭曲，以至于他们实际上无法区分事实和虚构。

I’d never encountered anything like it: Two people with shared memories of events which, to them, felt authentic—and much of which did check out as true—but some of which was implausible, and a few which turned out to be false.

我从来没有遇到过这样的事情：两个人对事件有共同的记忆，对他们来说，这些记忆是真实的——而且其中大部分确实是真实的——但其中一些是难以置信的，还有一些被证明是错误的。

It was as though their minds were designed less for record-keeping, and more for coping with their tremendous pain—flexible tools which were bending in all directions in an effort to make sense of their pasts.

就好像他们的大脑不是为了保存记录而设计的，而是为了应对巨大的痛苦而设计的——这些灵活的工具向各个方向弯曲，以努力理解他们的过去。

When I realized the way the twins were interweaving fact and fiction, with no clue they were doing so, I panicked.

当我意识到这对双胞胎将事实与虚构交织在一起时，我感到惊慌失措。

Double-sourcing wasn’t going to be enough to report this story; I needed to rethink my reporting methods, as well as the way I approached the writing, relying heavily on documents and secondary sources, and opting to include bits of questionable material as evidence of the kids’ shaky states of mind.

双重来源不足以报道这个故事；我需要重新思考我的报告方法，以及我的写作方式，严重依赖文件和二手资料，并选择包含一些有问题的材料作为孩子们不稳定的心态的证据。

After the article was published, the twins were worried I’d portrayed them as “liars,” which couldn’t have been farther from my intention.

文章发表后，双胞胎担心我将他们描绘成“骗子”，这与我的本意相去甚远。

I know they had told me nothing but the truth, as best they could.

我知道他们尽其所能告诉了我真相。

Photo: Duke University Library

照片：杜克大学图书馆