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Be Sure to Read This First: A Preface
- Utah State University Press
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ix DOI: 10.7330/9780874218930.c00 Be Sure to Read This First A Preface With individual stories, the statistics become people. —Neil Gaiman, American Gods I am . . . ambivalent about memoirs because of what I have learned about memory. Yet I also realize that we are constantly constructing our memoirs, polishing and tweaking our life stories, making order out of randomness every time we recount the events of the day. —Laura Lippman, “Shut Up, Memory” This book is partly a memoir, but a memoir with a difference and a premise: that our life memory is informed by and greatly influenced by the oral stories that we tell or have told about our lives and the stories others have told us about their lives or the past or the nature of culture and the world. Such stories may coexist with more generalized memories and documentary sources, like letters and diaries, that help us to remember or reformulate our pasts. But certainly the stories we tell and listen to play an integral role in constructing our temporal selves. This premise may be selfevident —especially to folklorists, who are aware of the social importance of personal narratives, family saga, and communal legends—but seldom has it been demonstrated for individual lives. This book, then, in part attempts to demonstrate and use some of my own life memories and stories as specimens to suggest the applicability of the premise. If all memoir is to some degree a self-indulgence, I further indulge myself as a folklorist by calling attention to the centrality of oral narration in my own life. Thus, in addition to providing the types of recollections found in all memoirs, this book includes my thoughts on the meanings of certain stories to my life and my sense of self. This admittedly makes for an odd sort of book. This memoir relies heavily on bits and pieces of oral history and oral narratives, accounts of past events that were passed on to me, accounts that Be Sure to Read This First x I have passed along to others, and most particularly, stories—accounts of the past that have crystallized into “finished” narratives. In the case of this memoir, however, I seek to specifically call attention to such narratives and emphasize their significance in creating personal records of our lives. The oral stories that come to us—in conversations and special recountings by relatives or friends, whether in passing or specially recalled—have considerable power to convey knowledge and meaning. I doubt that most of us are consciously aware of this power when we first begin to hear such stories , usually quite early in life. I know that I wasn’t. Yet that power is there. Because stories make events cohere into some sort of plot, because stories are often repeated so that their message is emphasized again and again, and because stories often speak of happenings somehow regarded as special, they take what might be the mundane facts of life and turn them into something transcendent. A story tells us: here is something significant, something worth remembering, something to internalize. A story calls attention to some aspect of memory that we and others think important to never forget. In this book I talk about the stories that are part of my personal memory and the memories of other people I have known and consider what they are telling me about my personal worldview and the worldview of those around me, about what I have been told about and have noticed about existence and the world and my passage through it. I mostly have no recordings of the stories I’ve heard or told and simply re-create them on the page, though in a few cases I format transcriptions of recordings as block quotations (without quotation marks). When I say that I re-create stories, I mean more than one thing. I occasionally reproduce a story—delinated by quotation marks—in what I imagine to be something like the language in which I or someone else might tell it. In most cases, however, I simply work the story into my larger text, hoping that I have retained something of the dramatic quality of oral narration (though not all told stories are necessarily “dramatic”). When I write here of something being a “story” or of some incident having become a “story” for me, I mean that this narrative is a tale I have told or that someone else has told—that it is a part...