Storystorm
My mother remembers almost nothing from her childhood. It is as if that time in her life, marked on one end by her birth and on the other by her father's death, is hidden from her like a mess someone covered gratefully with a napkin. The fact that my mother could remember nothing was problematic: I began to see my mother as someone other than the woman who made me turkey sandwiches for lunch and read to me at night; I became greedy for her stories. But every time I asked her about who she had been as a child, she would come up empty.“I don't really remember,” she'd say.Eventually I began to put the pieces together myself. After school, I would search through her room, the attic, our frequently-flooded basement for something that would cast her in greater relief: pictures from when she was young, pendants inscribed with mysterious initials, a small change purse filled with delicately folded handkerchiefs. My desire to understand the life she had lived—to piece it together, searching for it in the tattered pages of her yearbook, in the noticeably larger swoop of her signature on the inside cover, in the coded messages and inside jokes below her picture—was a desire to understand who and where I had come from. It was a desire to understand myself.“What does it mean?” I asked her once, pointing to the print below her yearbook picture, her at seventeen, perfectly made up, her dark brown hair blown out and curled up at the ends. She looked at the words, the words she had chosen to sum up her entire life until then. She looked serious for a minute.“I don't remember,” she said.The stories we share have power. They have the ability to entertain us, to make us feel, to evoke compassion. But what stories do best is to help us understand our place in the world. They connect us to ourselves—where we came from, what we believe in, what we know to be true—and they connect us to each other. This is what I was looking for in my mother's stories: some semblance of a connection, some inkling of my beginning in hers. I wanted to outline the edgeless shape of her in order to understand myself. I was a copy of her, after all, thick haired and hazel-eyed, in every way her echo. In order to understand who I was, I had to understand who she was.In Elizabeth Strout's “Incoming Tide,” the necessity for story is similarly apparent. Kevin, the main character, is in need of human connection and community. From the outset he presents himself as an outsider, distant from his emotions and the world around him, and this distance is a dangerous one. We know from the first few pages that Kevin intends to commit suicide. As Kevin sits in his car, contemplating his life, what he struggles with is not his own story, but the story of his mother. It is her suicide, after all, that has defined his life, influencing his relationships to other people and his understanding of the world. It is as if he can only make sense of his own depression by making sense of hers.What changes Kevin, then, are the stories that Olive tells him. It is through the work of storytelling that Kevin is ultimately saved.When Olive—Kevin's old teacher—interrupts his isolation by letting herself into his car and asking after him, Kevin is initially resistant, especially when she brings up his mother. When Olive takes the opportunity to describe her father's and son's respective struggles with mental illness, however, this act of storytelling provides him with a much-needed sense of connection. Immediately, Kevin “[feels] the stain of some sadness make its way from her to him” (Strout 37). This exchange of stories allows him to feel connected to someone in a way he had been incapable of up until now. But it is when Olive shares the story of how her father used to search for her when she was a little girl, playing along as she hid in a chest at the foot of the bed, that Kevin experiences his greatest moment of change. Moved by the story of her father's affectionate play, Kevin's immediate thought is that he doesn't want her to leave. Even though he was initially desperate for her to leave him alone, her stories have endeared her to him, inducing in him a profound feeling of intimacy. This intimacy, a direct result of her personal stories is what roots him firmly to his life. It is stories that make Kevin feel alive again: “At the very moment Kevin became aware of liking the sound of her voice, he felt adrenaline pour through him, the familiar, awful intensity, the indefatigable system that wanted to endure” (Strout 39). In this moment he is able to feel the forgotten vestiges of humanity and hope.In my first semester of graduate school, I had a professor who said on the first day of class, “We are a culture starved for stories.” In a world where people are increasingly isolated, where people are desperate for connection, it is stories that have the power to bring us together. Each week, in this small space, I will be writing about a short story. I hope that you will feel inclined to read these stories. I hope also, and more selfishly, that you will come back. But ultimately I hope that you will learn something here: something about yourself, something about the people around you, and something about the staggering power of words on a page. “Incoming Tide” is the second story in Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge.