Finding Your Essential Story
I had a book when I was a child that was an old edition of Longfellow’s Hiawatha. It was bound in brownish cloth and featured a color plate of a naked indigenous boy on the cover. I loved the picture of the child, his black silky hair, his bronzed skin. Now I know that the Brahmin poet Longfellow appropriated the Onondaga legend of Hiawatha, white-washed it and sold it to the Victorian reading public. But when I was a girl caressing the high-gloss finish of the cover illustration, I felt unshackled from the confines of my small life squeezed between the skyscrapers in Manhattan, itself an island once purchased from native peoples for trinkets according to legend. I imagined the freedom of the boy in the picture and the original wilderness of the spirit where I would encounter my essential story.
In her novel, My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout introduces a mentor who offers this guidance to Lucy, a writer starting out. “You will only have one story,” the mentor teaches. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You only have one.” I sat up straight when I read that. It really got my attention. I had always believed that someone who called herself a writer, someone who had a gift for arranging words in an order that conveyed meaning and engaged the reader, should be able to imaginatively inhabit a wide range of narratives and territories. Who says I can’t write a story set in the Florida panhandle or Morocco or Shanghai? Who says I can’t write about the circus or space travel? Just a little research is all. For years, I felt limited by the particulars of my biography, my singular story that unfolded high above the trash-strewn, neon-lit streets of New York. It’s only now as I become increasingly aware that it will all be over soon in any case that I realize that the search for that story is itself the story, as it is for each of us.
I would put it this way. My story is about finding my letter in Torah, identifying what it is that I can uniquely say about Life, give back to Life, what special offering I can make. If you are born, like most people, into a family that barely notices who you really are, you may struggle to find your true self. If you are born into a family that believes you are special, you may struggle to meet the idea that we are all equally special and necessary to the larger story. In my family, I was expected to be special but specialness itself was feared and sometimes despised. Mixed message. Push pull.
I have had to cultivate the patience of nature to find my story. You can’t go looking for it like one of the clues in a scavenger hunt. All you can do is lie back and let your story find you over long stretches of time the way a river carves its route out of rock or a single forget-me-not spreads its wings and propagates until an entire hillside turns pale blue. From the vantage point of my late seventies, I see that this unfolding is glacial and that part of what causes so much anguish for us is the misperception that it happens over night in a linear progression. In fact, it is our life’s work. It begins with the biographical data…sidewalk, Loew’s 83rd street, hopscotch, Smokey Robinson, bohemia, Truffaut, Camus….but from there wanders into the woods of ancestral dramas, historical context, false starts, bad advice, and just plain grace. By this I mean that you can be deep in the bush, no direction home and suddenly, unexpectedly, you see it. Your story.
In my case, it has always been a journey to the interior, more of a clearing in the jungle than a view from a mountaintop. It has been an indifference to the conventions of plot, an encounter with the hyperreality of birth and death appearing inexplicably but so vividly alongside the vaudeville song and dance of striving, accumulating, self-inventing. Every such journey is arduous. All of us hitchhiking on this freeway have had to let go of certain things, leave our old clothes in a pile on the floor until we are as naked as Hiawatha. Your story, after all, is not a fashion statement. It is the deepest truth of who you are that shines out of your darkness. It is the lullaby you sing to yourself.
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I can relate. My family kept each other in check with teasing and sarcasm. You had to grow a thick protective cover.
Very enlightening. You leave us with much to think about. Here are just some of my takeaways: the search for the story is itself the story; how you trace your story and how it expands with the telling; all of us hitchhikers on the freeway (great metaphor); and story as a lullaby we sing to ourselves. So glad you sing yours to us.
I also identify with the message: be special, but distrust specialness. In Irish families, we get teased if we stand out or seem to put ourselves above others, as Mary Gordon points out in an essay about why so many Irish American writers become journalists and speechwriters instead of poets and fiction writers.