The Many Faces We Leave Behind: The Life and Afterlife of Imola Tóth

An excerpt from The Encyclopedia of Forgotten Authors

Imola Tóth (1990–2067)

Author's note:

Fifteen years after the death of Imola Tóth, I was given the impossible task of writing her definitive biography.

The archive was overwhelming. There were journals, unpublished manuscripts, letters, interviews, photographs, and thousands of pages of work left behind by a woman who seemed determined to document her own existence.

I believed I would eventually find her.

I was wrong.

After two years of research, hundreds of interviews, and more hours spent studying her work than I care to admit, I arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion: everyone who told me about Imola Tóth was talking about a different woman.

Some remembered her as a difficult person. Others remembered her as kind and caring. Some described her as intimidating: fiercely independent and impossible to manipulate.

Others described a woman who apologized to furniture after bumping into it. A former colleague called her a thunderstorm disguised as a person, "the type that leaves chaos behind."

Another called her "the warmest soul I ever met."

After my research, I have to admit that both accounts seem accurate.

This is perhaps the first misunderstanding surrounding Imola Tóth, that she seemed to be fighting her entire life: the belief that people are supposed to be one thing.

The official literary record remembers Imola as the writer of the woods.

This is understandable. Much of her work revolved around forests, wilderness, forgotten places, and the invisible worlds hidden beneath ordinary life.

Critics often interpreted her forests symbolically: the forests represented healing, feminine power, grief, and escape from modern society.

There are entire academic papers written about what the forest meant to Imola Tóth.

The irony is that she spent years explaining that the forest did not represent anything. She spent the majority of her life playing, and later living and working, in forests.

For her, the forest simply was. She used to say that nature never asked her to explain herself.

She famously disliked when people turned everything into a metaphor and when academics tried to explained the meaning behind poems and other literary work.

She once said:

"Not everything is a symbol. Sometimes a tree is a tree. Sometimes a bumblebee landing on a flower is simply a bumblebee landing on a flower, and not a secret metaphor for the author's encounters with a young maiden... Perhaps humans have become so disconnected from the world that we cannot believe anymore that something exists without standing for something else."

-Imola Tóth

The sentence is frequently quoted in academic papers. And ironically, almost every paper uses the quote as a symbol.

The second great misunderstanding of Imola was the assumption that she was confident.

This idea came mostly from photographs.

There are hundreds of photographs of her standing among trees, notebooks in hand, hair untamed by the wind, looking exactly like the kind of person future generations imagine writers to be.

The photographs became famous, they were printed in articles and appeared in exhibitions.

They played a great role in creating the posthumous myth of Imola Tóth: the wild woman who abandoned ordinary life to follow creativity.

But she never wanted to escape the world. She wanted to experience more of it.

She loved forests, but she loved cafés too. She searched for silence, but she also searched for conversation. She wanted a cabin in the woods and a city apartment with a window overlooking strangers. She wanted life.

She wrote one question repeatedly in her journal: Who do I think I am?

She was not afraid of failure or being misunderstood.

She was always afraid of being revealed as someone who had never deserved success in the first place.

Perhaps the strangest discovery during my research was how often Imola Tóth questioned whether her own writing belonged to her.

Critics have debated this extensively. Even though she often talked about it in interviews, some interpreted her words as humility or as spirituality. For some, it was the evidence of her belief in artistic intuition.

One particular critic suggested it revealed an inability to take ownership of her achievements.

That interpretation always bothered me. It probably wasn't incorrect, but certainly incomplete. Imola did not believe she invented stories, she believed she received them.

She described herself not as a creator, but as a translator or a channel. She believed that ideas already exist outside of us, and that the artist was the person standing between worlds, trying to transform something invisible into human language without destroying its beauty.

She always worried she would fail. That the words would arrive magnificent and leave ordinary. That she would damage something sacred by attempting to explain it.

I understand why people find this idea romantic. But I find myself defending her in conversations with other researchers more often than I should.

Imola was not claiming to be chosen or special. She often said that we all have the same capacity to receive these ideas and to turn them into art. She was simply describing the terrors of being responsible for something you did not fully understand.

The more I studied Imola Tóth, the less certain I became about how to portray her.

A biographer's job is to reduce uncertainty, to gather evidence, to arrange fragments into a complete portrait.

Instead, every answer created another question.

Her journals contradicted her interviews. Her interviews contradicted her public image. Her public image contradicted the woman described by those closest to her.

At some point, I began wondering whether anyone had truly known her. Perhaps this is the tragedy of becoming famous after death.

While people are alive, we see a person. After their death, we see a story.

My greatest regret in writing this entry is that nobody interviewed Imola Tóth properly while she was alive.

Of course, many people interviewed her. They asked about her books, her childhood, her creative process, her influences. They asked what her stories meant. They asked why she wrote. But nobody asked the questions that mattered.

Nobody asked: What did we misunderstand about you? What part of yourself did you hide?

Nobody asked her what she wished people would remember. Perhaps because nobody expected she would become someone worth remembering. Perhaps because we always assume there will be more time, another conversation, another letter, another chance to ask. Until suddenly there isn't.

I have spent years trying to find the real Imola Tóth.

I read through every diary several times. I read every unfinished manuscript, listened to every recorded conversation.

And eventually, I discovered something that feels disappointing but fascinating at the same time: there is no final version. There is no hidden truth waiting at the bottom of the archive.

There is only what she showed to people.

And I don't know why I was even surprised by this, because even she said it once in an interview when she was asked about her finished manuscripts:

"Stories never truly get finished. There's a moment when we have to put down the pen, stop editing and give the manuscript out of our hands. But they live on. Inside the author and in the many versions created by the people who read these stories. They never end."

-Imola Tóth

Perhaps that is true for everyone, not just for stories. We never become one final person who can be explained.

Perhaps we spend our lives creating ourselves, only for others to continue the creation after we are gone.

I should end this entry here. The encyclopedia requires a conclusion, a summary. A final statement about Imola Tóth's contribution to literature. Something certain that can be placed into a box.

But certainty was never something she offered. And after all these years, I suppose I learned that from her.

The truth is not always a thing waiting to be discovered. Sometimes the truth is in the searching. Sometimes the truth is in the question itself.

And perhaps that is why I have struggled so much to write this. Because after all these years, after all the research, after all the evidence...

I still do not know how to explain her.

I still do not know how to explain myself.

But then again, I suppose that is the problem with writing about someone who has died. Everyone wants to know who they were.

Nobody thinks to ask whether they are still here.

The dead are not supposed to answer without an ouija board. Nobody expects them to keep writing. Certainly nobody expects them to correct the record.

So let me correct the record one final time.

My name is Imola Tóth.

I died twenty years ago.

And apparently, I am still trying to figure out who I was.