Looking for a Story to Tell

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I was writing Ella's stories because I could not write my own. I could not write my own because I did not know who came before me. Writing Ella's stories led me, after a time, to search them out.

I was looking for a story to tell.

I had been asked, as had the other six grandchildren, to offer memories of my grandmother at her funeral.

But hard as I thought, as many images of my grandmother as I could conjure, I couldn't find a story--neither one that she had told me, nor a story about her--something with a beginning, a middle, an end.

I could see her vividly: presiding over the table during holiday dinners, carrying out her raspberry chiffon pies in their silver pie plates and carefully setting them down on the table with a little gasp of effort. I thought of the miniature swans at each place that she filled with almonds she had roasted in butter and sprinkled with coarse salt. I thought of her white, wavy hair, which was fine and shiny and thick, and of her hands, which were delicate.

Though plenty of vivid images came to mind, none would cohere into a story. I remembered her driving me to horseback-riding lessons and scaring me to death with her speed and bad peripheral vision. I remembered once going with her to Schraft's for a lime rickey. But no stories. There were duties fulfilled, people cared for. There was accomplishment: My grandmother graduated from Wellesley Collegeññas did my mother, who was Phi Beta Kappaññand went on to earn a master's degree in education from Harvard. There were the children brought up, sent off to fine colleges themselves.

But where were the stories of loves, of dreams, of ambitions? How did these women understand their lives? How did they understand their places in history, in their social class, or even in their families? This was not an issue, for me, of mere curiosity.

One of my younger cousins is also a writer. Before the funeral, I asked her if she had a story about our grandmother. She confessed that she was also having trouble finding one. We talked for a while about our predicament. No stories. No plot.

'Have you ever thought about what plot is?' I asked her.

She looked at me with interest.

'A friend once told me: 'Plot is desire.''

My cousin's eyes grew wide. I quoted Hegel, who wrote that desire is the wish to be completely known to another. I said that I believed the only way for some of us to satisfy that deep wish to be known is to find a way to tell the story of our lives. I venture to say that writing the story of our lives--in whatever fashion that may be, from creating photo albums to sewing quilts to running a restaurant to writing music or stories--is a central human imperative.

I also struggle with plot because at a deep, almost preconscious level, I lack the sound of the stories of the women who preceded me. It is as if I have inherited their despair of not ever being known, not ever being really listened to and understood. Although I have had more adventures than I can record, I have yet to find a voice for them. As a writer of nonfiction, I write other people's stories.

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