“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote in The White Album in the last century. It has become her iconic quote, as well as the title of her collected nonfiction. Didion used the phrase “in order to live” in the context of trying not to become a psychiatric patient, musing that we need to tell ourselves stories to come to terms with the unexplainable things that happen around us. We tell ourselves we get it when we don’t. When the stories don’t hold, Didion wrote, neither do we.
Our reasons may vary, but telling stories is as old as humankind: Think of cavemen and cavewomen and cavechildren around the newly discovered fire, embellishing their accounts of the hunt. Some of the cave illustrations of their exploits still survive, giving us an archaeological glimpse of prehistoric communal living.
We often think of stories as fabricated, as fiction, but I am thinking of the real-life stories we tell our children and grandchildren. I told my 3-year-old granddaughter that when I was little, we called my grandfather “Pops.” This name delighted her more than I expected, and I pictured my grandfather’s wide, chuckling face, a face she will only ever know in old photographs. My grandfather is two generations above me in the family tree, and my granddaughter is two generations below. I am balancing in the middle. My experience of them and my love for them at opposite ends of my life extend their common bond.
I have read that in Korean folklore, instead of beginning a long-ago story with “Once upon a time,” the storyteller says, “Back when tigers used to smoke.” How enchanting is that? We can trace our human history back to when tigers used to smoke, much like the strands of DNA that have connected and sustained, and will connect and sustain, our families. Our stories tie us together as closely as our genetic links to the eggs in the wombs of our newborn granddaughters.
My parents were enthusiastic storytellers, giving us kids verbal portraits of their parents and relatives, neighbors and teachers, pets and friends, little clips of what life was like for them before television or spaceships. I can tell stories about growing up without cell phones or the internet. My kids will tell stories about their time without whatever new inventions their kids will take for granted, and that I cannot envision. We share our stories about the past to link our history to the present and to preserve our history for the future. Sometimes we write them down.
A consequential collection of passed-down stories in the oral tradition is the Bible, the faith narratives that have been retold for millennia. Before most people could write or read, they knew the stories by heart, from Genesis to Jesus, because it was some elder’s job to relay the stories as accurately as possible. “Everything in the Bible is true,” a priest once told me, “and some of it actually happened.” I got in some trouble when I repeated that while teaching a parish confirmation class to teenagers, but I stand by it. Our stories may be mythic, may be fantastical, may be unrealistic, but if they have endured, they contain some rough gem of truth. The stories Jesus told to reach his disciples still reach us today. Shared stories form and structure our community of faith by instilling in us a time-tested moral code for the ages. We tell them not so much in order to live but to live in a world made more loving and compassionate because of us.
I know it gets tiresome when the old folks in our lives tell us the same story five times, sometimes in one sitting. My siblings and I still joke about our mom letting her new son-in-law know that he had the same birthday as Cousin Timmy. “Did you know that today is Timmy’s birthday, too?” we ask him, even though he’s been in the family for over 20 years now and our mom has been gone for nine. My mother’s stories ran on what I came to think of as her auto-pilot: Sometimes I could see in her eyes the spark that had ignited in her mind, and I knew a whole story was coming. The whole story. Even if someone said, “Oh yeah, you told me already,” the whole story had to play out to its natural end. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you,” Maya Angelou wrote, though I think she meant the kind of impactful story you’ve never shared before.
The stories my mother could remember must have had a great impact on her. They anchored her in uncertain waters. And maybe as we age, we do tell our stories in order to have an intended impact on the listener. We think our experiences of failure might spare a young person the same pain, although this rarely pans out. We believe a pertinent story will cause the listener to reconsider some decision or behavior, although it rarely does. We hope our stories will shed light on some problem or soothe some hurt or alleviate some misconception, and every now and then these things do happen. Sometimes our stories offer life lessons. Sometimes they define who we are. Sometimes they make us feel good to remember. Sometimes they reassure us of the value of our own lives. Sometimes they’re just funny.
One morning I heard my daughter telling my granddaughter about a song her grandfather, my father, used to sing. It made me miss my dad. Kids loved my dad because he was open-hearted and goofy and would hang out with them on their level. I think he liked kids better than grown ups. How I wish he could have lived to be a great-grandfather. But then I think: He’s here with us now, in my daughter’s kitchen, as she lavishes on her daughter a story about how her silly grandfather always got song lyrics wrong.
Someday, my granddaughter may tell her granddaughter this same story, about the great-grandfather she never met. Or she may not. It is impossible to know which of our stories will take root in the fertile soil of the hearts of our loved ones and which will be forgotten. Someday, we will all become distant memories, faded portraits, branches way high up in the family tree. All the more reason to keep telling our stories.
