A STORY ADDICTION

It has been a long time since I first discovered stories.  Everyone is attracted to them in one way or another, but my own attraction has been slowly refined and is gradually narrowing.  Such things must.

The first stories I remember holding in specific awe were the Nancy Drew books.  They were so perfectly neat, so expertly crafted, so tightly wound up within themselves.  They were fascinating, but they were not real.

I had a long love affair with fiction that lasted well into high school.  I became an escapist.  Stories that had been invented out of someone else’s head were a way of getting out of my own world when it became too boring or too complicated.  Every person who reads fiction does so, at base, for the same reason.  They don’t do it just for stories, because you can get stories everywhere.  The newspapers are full of them, of real ones.

It was my first semester of college when I lost my heart to another kind of story.  This was the combined result of a thoroughly engrossing history course and a particular paper which I wrote for my literary theory class: I developed a taste for true stories about things that really happened.  The assignment, for Literary Theory, was to analyze a certain writer’s work through the lens of his life.  I had loved this person’s writing (which was fiction), but the details of his own life were more absorbing still.  I wasn’t even sure why I was so interested in a man whose life had never intersected my own, save through his written work.  But the factual, this-actually-happened quality of the story was the most attractive thing – it wasn’t even, to be honest, the story itself.  The thing that attracted me was that the story was true. 

I started to read biographies later, a year later, at least.  I say “biographies,” but it was a slow addiction that started with just one book about the life of J. R. R. Tolkien.  I read it twice, and I learned something about the written word: the real fun was to be had in true stories.  I had been in the business of real people’s stories for a long time, but it had taken the form of an analytical perspective on the lives of people I knew and frequently interacted with.  An obvious, but previously unconsidered way to collect more complete stories became quickly, abruptly, immediately and yet gradually ever more apparent to me.  I could just crack open a single book to find the entire arc of a life laid out before me.

Biographies have a bit of a bad reputation and are regarded with something of a suspicious eye.  You might think, as many people do, that they are boring.  I used to think that, and it couldn’t have been from experience, because until recently I hardly touched biographies (I was busy with things like Nancy Drew).  It’s true that there are long-winded, poorly made biographies out there, but these are giving the genre a bad name.  A biography is an adventure.  It is an intimate character study of a single existence.  It offers a peek into how a life plays out, what shapes a person, why he did what history tells us that he has accomplished.  But why stop with famous people?  Every person has a story.  Every person’s life is a neatly constructed, expertly crafted narrative which is tightly wound up within itself to give you the full picture.  Every life is a story.  Every one is worth a biography. 

I have a fairly new ambition in my head, to unwrap these stories and give them life.  Each of them is important, because each of them is gloriously, wonderfully real.