Joshua asks
marytabor.substack.com
Joshua asks
The answers to the biggest questions we have about identity, story, and God can only be answered in relation to memory. Without memory, we are forced to rely solely on ideas and suggestions to make sense of who we are, as opposed to the concrete.
Cole Arthur Riley • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
sari and added
The question clearly being asked in an exemplary memoir is “Who am I?” Who exactly is this “I” upon whom turns the significance of this story-taken-directly-from-life? On that question the writer of memoir must deliver. Not with an answer but with depth of inquiry.
Vivian Gornick • The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
All this made me think of Joan Didion’s most famous sentence: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It’s a sentence that has found its way onto Pinterest boards, T-shirts, and coffee mugs, as though it were a consoling affirmation of The Power of Storytelling. It is not.
The sentence is the first one of Didion’s essay “The White Album,” whi... See more
The sentence is the first one of Didion’s essay “The White Album,” whi... See more
Alan Jacobs • Stories to Live By
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which ... See more
A quote from The White Album
Rob Tourtelot added
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores.
Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
Alex Dobrenko and added
We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didio... See more