STORY GIRL

My husband Ed calls me “Story Girl.” Though “girl” is stretching things a bit, Ed knows my history, and I understand why he’d think the name suits me. My first memory is sitting beside my mother on our couch, Mama reading a story book, my interrupting her with words I recognized.

I’m told that, when I was three or four, I’d sidle up to my Grandmother and say, “Mama Toland? I’ll tell you forty-seven stories if you’ll tell me forty-seven stories. Okay?”

Juanita, my caretaker from age six up to junior high, called TV soap operas “the stories”, and I’d watch them with her while she ironed my family’s clothes. We watched movies too, and if I arrived late to start one, she’d summarize for me. “That Mr. Rochester’s wife, she’s crazy,” she said, explaining Jane Eyre. “And she does not like Jane one bit, I tell you that much.”

At Sunday School, my favorite parts were the Bible stories. I particularly liked the Solomon story, where, when the wise king is presented with two women who both claim to be a foundling baby’s mother, he knows immediately the real mama is the one who, when he suggests they cut the baby in half, wails, “No! She can have him. Just let him live!” That story, I thought, had some meat to it.

I treasured my library card, and like many children who mature early verbally, I read stories beyond my years, guessing at meanings and pronunciations, often getting them wrong. “Sword,” I learned, after pronouncing it “sWord” at the breakfast table, has a silent W, and grownups think it’s cute when you don’t know that.

Reading Little Women, when I was twelve, I knew I was vain like Amy, wanted to marry and cook like Meg, was often shy like Beth, and was a tomboy bookworm like my favorite, Jo. I was a Little Woman myself, I realized, and proud of it.

As I grew older, I delighted in word play. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Detective Nancy Drew declared when working on a case involving an inheritance. I found that delightfully clever. I wanted to be Nancy, zipping around town in her sports car with her handsome boyfriend Ned.

Working as a psychotherapist, I learned, through my clients’ stories, how tender our insides are beneath the defenses we erect to protect us. There’s nothing like sitting with a tough, sarcastic man, wiping tears he fought and couldn’t quell, telling you how he and his little sister used to cower in the closet when their Daddy came home raging drunk. My clients’ stories told me more about them than did their facades, and helped me know and help them.

I’m writing a story now—a novel. It’s the hardest and the funnest thing I’ve ever done. I get to watch myself tell a tale and create a person and ask, “What would she do here?”, knowing the only way I can answer that is to have a part of me that identifies with and understands her. “I could be you. You could be me,” is the essence of stories.

Recent research shows that reading literary fiction increases our ability to empathize. No surprise. I plan to tell everyone I know. We need all the empathy we can get—and give—these days.

And I’ll tell you forty-seven stories if you’ll tell me forty-seven stories. Okay?

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