Telling Our Stories, Co-creating Ourselves
One must talk, talk, talk—provided one has someone to talk to, as you and I have.
MAURICE, SPEAKING TO HIS FRIEND CLIVE
IN MAURICE, BY E. M. FORSTER
It had been another one of those beautiful mornings. Seth and I had been working contentedly on the final portion of a large Victorian carriage house. Seth had been in a kind of reverie all morning, and he and I had worked together in silence. After a month of painting side by side, I’d learned something about Seth’s reveries: Occasionally out of his silence would emerge a sentence or two—spoken out loud. Or almost spoken out loud, shall we say? I was never really sure whether these utterances were addressed to me, or simply to the wind.
“I actually think he hates me,” Seth said at one point.
I, sitting within earshot, supposed he was referring to his father.
I let Seth’s words hang in the air.
But Seth continued: “I think maybe he feels betrayed or something. Like I’ve left him in the dust. Like my going to college was some kind of fuckin’ judgment on him.” He shook his head left and right. Not so much with anger, but with bewilderment. “Asshole.”
I continued painting in silence for a while, pondering the import of what he’d said, and still not sure if this was a conversation he really wanted to have.
But his words had triggered me. I had something of my own to say.
“Funny you say that, ’cause I really think my father hates me, too,” I said, reaching to finish a section of clapboard, and trying to mimic Seth’s nonchalant manner. “We had a huge fight last time I was home.”
Seth looked at me for a long moment. Now it was clear. We were indeed having a conversation.
2
Seth and I already knew quite a bit about each other’s story. But we were edging closer to the details now.
Our fathers were both active alcoholics, and occasional rage-oholics. This story had gradually spilled out in the first month of our work together. But I had had a very different response from my father about my education—about college. He was all for it. In fact, he was jealous of my educational opportunities. He coveted them in a way that felt weird and stifling to me. My father was a real challenge for me—and I didn’t then quite realize its magnitude. That would come later in my college career. But Seth was living in an altogether different universe of ill-treatment.
I was shocked by the way Seth’s family had isolated and ostracized him around the issue of college. His father was mammothly pissed off about it, seemingly all the time. His mother was silent, in the way a wife might be if she’d been abused. And apart from his parents—who lived outside Amherst in a small farmhouse—Seth appeared to have no other family around at all. His brothers and sisters, of whom there were plenty, had all decamped as soon as they’d reached their eighteenth birthdays. And whatever extended family Seth had was still in Ireland.
“What’s your father like when he’s drinking?” I asked eventually, from my side of the plank—not wanting to drop this moment, but not knowing exactly how far I could go.
Now Seth really spilled. He told of his father’s drunken rages. Of being beaten. I identified—in ways I wasn’t quite yet ready to admit.
But I took some risks that day, too. I told Seth the story of our family’s disastrous sabbatical year in Spain just three years earlier—when I had been sixteen. My father’s drinking bouts had hit new lows there, and his rage—and self-loathing—were amplified by the fact that his writing project was going poorly. I told Seth how my father, drunk, had once that year thrown me up against a wall and choked me until I couldn’t breathe. Even as I told the story, I could barely believe that it had happened. But it had happened, and in telling it, I was really joining Seth.
“His face was like a monster’s,” I said, recalling the scene vividly.
Like a monster’s. This fact seemed to fascinate both of us. We talked in-depth about our father’s faces when they were in drunken rages—as if in describing them in detail we were expunging the memory. I tried to mimic my father’s face when he was in a rage. Sweating. Glasses sliding down his nose. Face beet red.
Seth repeated: “Yeah, a monster.”
As I think back on it, I realize now that it must have been a relief to have a friend with whom to share all of this. A friend who knew. Who’d been there himself.
I could never match Seth’s stories for drama, though. “My father,” he said, “locked me out of the house for a week. I slept in the woods behind the high school. Didn’t have any money. Was only fifteen.” And then, making light of it, “It was May, and I nearly froze my balls off.”
I laughed along with him, because I barely knew what to say. That was as far as we went on that particular day. But that night we drank more heavily than usual.
3
One of the most riveting activities of twinship is telling one another our stories. We have finally found someone with whom we can unburden ourselves. (Unburden? Had we even been aware of the burden? I think not. It’s most likely the case that until this “someone” comes along, we have no idea how burdened we actually are.)
But for me, at least, this person had come along. And now the stories began to roll out—almost of their own accord. (Have you noticed this, by the way? Nobody has to teach us to tell these stories. The narrative urge is a powerful internal imperative. Like sex. We seem to know how to do it—at least vaguely.)
It’s a meme in our culture that teenagers love to talk. Love to talk, yes, but only with one another. Not with parents. Teenagers in our time have a storied love affair with the cell phone. Why? Because as teens, we’re driven to tell and retell our stories. Obliquely, often. In shrouded ways. But insistently. Indeed, as an adolescent, every aspect of our day is potentially tell-able—no matter how apparently insignificant. What am I wearing today? Why? What does it mean? What—exactly—did your mother say when you wouldn’t wear a tie to church? What—exactly—was the look on her face? We must get the nuance right. We are processing our interactions with the world.
Later on, we have all night “rap groups” (yes, lingo from my era) in our college dorms. And long, soulful walks full of talking. I remember these vividly—almost more than anything else that happened to me in college. What do you think of the war? What do you think of life? How will you avoid the traps of your parents’ pathetic lives?
E. M. Forster’s great novel Maurice is a classic coming-of-age story, portraying young men remarkably like Seth and me—young men who were finding one another as they found themselves. Says one of these characters—the brave and ill-fated Lord Risley—to Forster’s hero, Maurice: “We must talk, talk, talk.” Only gradually does Maurice realize the life or death nature of Risley’s declaration. “Yes!! We must talk!” (Later on, Maurice—having learned the power of talking—echoes the lesson to his best friend, Clive. He says, “One ought to talk, talk, talk—provided one has someone to talk to, as you and I have.”)
In the beginning, I was more like Maurice than Lord Risley. I was conventional. Restrained. Slow to open up. I was not so sure that it was actually okay to tell my story (especially the hard parts)—and thereby to refashion it.
Okay, then Lord Risley. Okay. Yes! We must talk. And talk we did that summer of Smart Ass Painters. Our crew went over and over the daily stories of adventure, peril, hardship, and hilarity. What did these adventures mean? Who acted how? Why in heaven’s name did we do what we did? Who were each of us in the context of any particular happening?
That summer, Seth and I were sloughing off our old stories—the story of parent and child, the stories we had been told. And we were creating new stories for ourselves. Adult stories. We were trying to figure out “who we are now”—and to put it all in perspective of some kind. This telling of stories is one of the central mechanisms of identity reorganization, and one of the highest gifts of twinship.
As we have seen, adolescence is identity reorganization par excellence. It turns out that we integrate these identity reformations in very large part through a kind of narrative therapy. But here’s the catch: This therapy takes two. Our storytelling requires an interested, engaged, involved listener. It requires someone who is invested. A passive, uninvolved listener will simply not do. For me that summer, the refashioning of my personal narrative required Seth.
Think of your own experiences with twinship. We need twinship throughout the entire course of life, but especially when we’re working something out. When we’re reinventing ourselves.
4
Psychologists know quite a bit about this narrative function—and increasingly understand the central role it plays in development.
By the middle of the third year of life, specialists tell us, “a child has begun to join caregivers in mutually constructed tales woven from their real life events and imaginings.” At around the age of three, a “narrative function” emerges in children and allows them to create stories about the events they encounter during their lives. Says Dr. Siegel, “These narratives are sequential descriptions of people and events that condense numerous experiences into generalizing and contrasting stories. New experiences are compared to old ones . . . [These] stories are about making sense of events and the mental experiences of the characters” (emphasis added).
Dan Siegel tells us, intriguingly: “Children begin as biographers and emerge into autobiographers.” In other words, these three-year-olds (now with their developing narrative function) begin by telling stories of their real life encounters—sequentially and ploddingly and carefully—and they end by integrating these stories into their own ongoing and coherent sense of selfhood. Children’s self-told stories are essential for creating a sense of coherence and continuity of the self across the past, present, and future—and for constructing a conceptual frame on which to hang their lives.
Children begin to develop a true “authorial self” much earlier than we might have imagined. In the view of Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf, this authorship brings with it “the ability to act independently of the impinging facts of a situation” (emphasis added). She goes on to describe this process, and we may recognize it as the development of what Freud called an “observing ego.” (The observing ego is the part of the self that stands apart from the action. The part of the self that sees. The observer self.) Wolf goes on, saying that this process requires “the ability to ‘uncouple’ various lines of experience . . . [as well as] the emergence of explicit forms of representation to mark the nature of and movement among the stances of the self.” In other words, our storytelling helps us to develop a stance from which we can observe the developing sense of self—can stand apart from it ever so slightly.
What we often haven’t understood about these autobiographical narratives, though, is the extent to which they are co-created by significant others. Stories are socially constructed. Our most deeply felt personal processes, like thought, or self-reflection, actually have their origins as interpersonal communication.
Parents are rarely aware of the influence they have in the creation of their child’s narrative function. Early on, parents may consciously help guide a co-construction of coherent narratives by engaging their children in conversations about events and their meanings and import. We now know, for example, that the most effective parents actually encourage their children to reflect with them about the events in their lives, and their meaning. “How was your day at school, honey?” “What did you learn today?” “Did you talk with Danny about what happened yesterday?”
It has been shown that “interventions to increase parental reflection on shared experiences . . . improve the child’s growing autobiographical sense of self.” It turns out that children who narrate life events with their parents will begin to narrate such events to themselves.
5
I can see now so clearly how my own “authorial self” developed. It was primarily born from my bond with my grandmother—Armeda VanDemark Crothers, the master storyteller. I recall vividly: Grandma and I would sit together on the front porch or at the kitchen table talking over my experiences in her vast domain—in the garden, around the house, and then later in college. She would prompt my reflection with questions: What did you see in the garden today, honey? What did grandpa tell you about the raspberries? Did he tell you where the plants came from? Did he tell you about great-grandmother’s garden, and her love of raspberries, and her special jam recipe? You know, your great grandmother once . . . And so forth.
Grandma’s reflections always instinctively hovered not only around the events themselves—which were indeed important—but around their larger meaning: What was your experience and what does it mean? How does it relate to your life? I remember how urgent these conversations felt. And I remember the deep need to share these conversations not with just anyone, but most urgently with Grandma—with whom I had already created a deep sense of family narrative. How did the garden fit into the life of our family? How did agriculture fit into the life of our family? Why was it so important to my grandfather? And his father before him?
My conversations with Armeda were highly charged with meaning. When she died, this was one of the things I missed most of all. I would think, “Oh, I’ve got to share that with Grandma. I need Grandma to know about that.” As if it couldn’t be fully real until it was shared with her—with my colleague in autobiography, the co-creator and holder of my life’s narrative.
Even now, pictures of my grandmother line my office wall. Why are they there? They’re there to remind me of who I am. To remind me of my story. Each snapshot is full of meaning. Each snapshot is a story in itself: Grandma as a young farm girl, Grandpa and me picking raspberries—he in his wide-brimmed straw hat and bow tie, Grandma and me cooking the selfsame raspberries into jam. My wall is hung with portraits, just as her home was. This is a way of keeping the story alive—and with me, and in me.
I remember being quiet and rapt at family dinners at Grandma’s, sitting around the table with a collection of twelve or fifteen great-aunts and -uncles, and at least one—and sometimes two—great-grandmothers. And what did we do? We told stories.
The creation of narratives gives meaning and organization to experience. But it’s important to understand that the process is slow and massively interactive. I say again: slow and massively interactive! Over time this narrative function leads to adaptive self-organization and coherent functioning.
As Dennie Wolf states, the self is “a kind of volume where the chapters of a very personal history accumulate.” As the child lives through different varieties of self-experience, her developing authorial self is challenged to incorporate these into a coherent autobiographical narrative process. The narrative process, then, is an attempt to make sense of the world and of one’s own mind and its various states.
Most importantly, as we grow and develop, these narratives give us a sense of a continuous self in time—a stable and ongoing sense of identity. Remember our friend Dan Buie—the psychiatrist—and his five self-maintenance functions? First, to be safely held and soothed. Second, to feel the realness of experience. Remember what the third was? To create a stable and ongoing sense of identity. Stable and ongoing. Well, one central way in which this is accomplished is through telling and retelling the tales of who we are with loved others.
Eventually, of course—and you will most likely remember this from your own experience—peer groups replace parents and family as the crucible of narrative. Our peers become our primary partners in co-creative narrative. Ask any parent of a teenager what his kid is thinking and feeling. The most frequent response: “You’ll have to ask his friends.”
7
During the summer of Smart Ass Painters, our crew sat around campfires almost every night at our secret spot down in the woods. And what did we do? We talked deep into the night.
Seth was a prolific storyteller, especially when the entire tribe was gathered around. He loved an audience. And he loved to recite poetry—especially, of course, Yeats and the Irish poets. In the absence of a vital nuclear family experience, Seth, it appears, had adopted a bigger family: Ireland and its bards. He told stories about his family in Ireland. About his grandfather—his only true container, as I see it now—whom he loved deeply. About how his grandfather had taught him to box “in the old style.” (This, I understood now, had been the beginning of his wrestling career—and I understood how meaningful it was to him. Wrestling was a way of keeping his grandfather with him.)
8
As I got to know Seth better, though, something troubling happened. I began to sniff out some vague distortions in his stories. (And sometimes some not-so-vague distortions.) Honestly, at times I was not sure that Seth actually knew the difference between reality and story. And partway through the summer, it hit me like a thunderbolt: some of Seth’s stories were entirely made up.
Holy shit! This made my head explode. I resisted the truth at first. I didn’t want to see this side of Seth. I realized then that I had idealized Seth. And I hated the crack that slowly began to appear. Finally, I saw clearly that there was a tremendous amount of posing going on with Seth. Posing of which, I believe, he was entirely unaware.
One night Seth told a story about his grandfather being a laborer on the Titanic construction crew in Belfast, Ireland, in the early 1900s. It was a riveting story. And deftly told. But I knew that it was almost certainly not true. It conflicted floridly with other stories Seth had told about his grandfather. (Didn’t anyone else notice?)
After everyone else had gone to bed that night, Seth and I were finishing a beer. I pressed him. “Jesus, man, really? The Titanic? How do you even come up with this stuff?” (I tried to tread lightly. A little humor.)
Seth looked at me first with a broad, but clearly phony smile. He laughed nervously.
Then for a moment he looked like I had hit him.
“Oh, come on, man,” I continued, “you do know that that’s not true, don’t you? I mean it’s a great story, and we all loved it. But you gotta admit, at least you gotta admit to me for God’s sake, that it’s not really true.”
He looked away into the woods for a long moment, and then stood up dramatically. And a little bit threateningly.
I’m sure I was quite obviously shaken, because even now I remember that moment so vividly.
Seth stormed off and left me alone for the night, in my sleeping bag in the woods. I didn’t sleep.
Seth didn’t come to work the next day. After we finished painting that day at the carriage house, I went to seek him out. I found him in his apartment, still in bed—hung over. He wouldn’t speak with me.
This was our first big fight. I had hit the third rail, clearly. (Though I didn’t really know quite yet what the exact makeup of that third rail was.) And I was shocked to see how Seth was handling it. Doubt about our very friendship crept in. Could Seth really be a good friend? Was he an alcoholic like his father? In addition to doubt, I was feeling enraged. Also hurt. Scared. Guilty. I was really undone by this fight—and I think I was terrified that I had just blown apart something that was really important to me. I did not understand what was going on—or what was really at stake for Seth.
The summer of play had turned dark.
9
I have said that this summer in Amherst tends to be surrounded in my memory by a halo of near perfection—a glow of good feeling. But, alas, I too easily forget what it was really like there on the ground. There were huge conflicts under the surface of our young personalities, and almost all of these conflicts were as yet unarticulated. But, unnamed as they were, they were being aired and potentially resolved in the context of our friendships. The presence of these latent conflicts meant that there were great dangers as well as great possibilities involved in bringing them to light. We each felt that, I think, though we could not then have said it. There were so many internal struggles: Will we each come forth as our authentic selves? Will we grow up—or fall apart?
And this: Would I join Seth in his fantasy world or not? After all, the essence of twinship is joining. How far do we go in this joining? At what point does it become destructive? At what point must we go our own way?
I remember now, as these darker truths come to mind, that those years at Amherst were actually full of doubt, and of conflict. We were all experiencing these challenges. And, truly, we did not all make it through unscathed. I remember several guys who had to leave school in the middle of the night—apparently broken under the pressure of it all. Some had private breakdowns. Some more public—like one of my best friends who had a nervous breakdown late one night, right in front of my eyes, and later committed suicide. These dark events were whispered about among us boys and then dropped. They were way too close for comfort. I know that I myself wondered, privately, if this could happen to me.
Seth and I—and our buddies—were up to our eyeballs in the common struggles, the common conflicts of adolescence. Do you remember how these conflicts played out in your own adolescence?
Here are some of the many unspoken challenges we each faced that summer:
As it turns out, many of these conflicts will be worked out—at least in the first instance—in the context of our adolescent and late-teen twinships.
I certainly did my share of “working through” of these issues that long first summer with Seth.