Week 5: The Art of a Story

There is no way to tell an interesting story without a few embellishments. Life is generally mundane, but there are great stories to be told. Everyone has someone in their life who can tell an amazing story. Even if it's something as simple as going to the store and having an awkward encounter with the cashier, if they are a natural storyteller, they will make it exciting.

Continuity is such an important aspect of telling a story. If you can't stay on track of the timeline of your events then how will readers stay engaged in your story? A great storyteller, to me, is someone who can keep you listening, without you having to ask "wait, back up, who are you talking about again?"

Keeping a steady flow and rhythm to any story is key, and I think that's what this article meant by fluidity. If you have to brighten up some facts or add in a little lie or two, it's okay if it makes the story flow better. People forget things all the time, I don't remember what I had for breakfast this morning, so it's expected for memoir writers to forget a tiny detail, and replace it with something that doesn't necessarily change the story it just helps it move along more smoothly.

When a memoir has great continuity and the writer is a natural storyteller, you find yourself wanting to turn each page to find out what happens next. I listened to Michelle Obama's Becoming on Audible, because she was reading it, and I love listening to her speak. I was totally hooked right away, she just has a way with words, and you feel like you're listening to an old friend recall a moment in their life. Everything pieces together so nicely.

It's a powerful thing to find a book that changes you in some way, and I think memoirs have a leg up on other genres, because it feels like you know the person and that you can empathize with what they went through. Although I loved Michelle Obama's book, my favorite memoir is Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan. It was the first memoir I'd read fully, and although it may have heightened the hypochondriac side of me, I was blown away by the gripping story told from someone who I have never heard of.

Susannah was a 20-something-year-old living in New York and she has her dream job of working as a journalist at the Post, she's perfectly normal and healthy, has a great boyfriend and everything. She finds herself struggling to pay attention during interviews, paranoid about bed bugs in her apartment, and oddly sensitive to the sounds and lights of the city. She knows something must be wrong with her and her fears are confirmed when she has a seizure one night and lands herself in the hospital.

Doctors tell her that she drinks too much, even though she only drinks one glass of wine a night, and that these seizures are obvious symptoms of alcohol withdrawal, and they send her back home. Only for her seizures to get worse, and her sanity goes out the window. She returns to the hospital with her parents who urge the doctors to consider other options, but the doctors can't pinpoint what is wrong with her.

One doctor finally cracks the code after doing a simple brain test and he finds out that she has anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. A mouthful yes, but it has only been diagnosed 300 times in the world. The disease is basically best described as the exorcist disease, it makes patients seize and changes their behavior into aggressive and paranoid, very similar to those who were given "exorcisms" in the past.

Her treatment is relatively simple and she ends the memoir with a call to action about how many people must have gone misdiagnosed in the past. She talks about her difficulties dealing with this "new" version of herself, citing that she is scared that everyone will see her as "that girl with the disease."

"Would I ever feel comfortable in my own skin again? Or would this self doubt follow me around forever? I was nothing like the confident "pre-" person this man once dated, and I hated myself for how drastically I had changed." 

Other than making me feel even more like a hypochondriac, this memoir taught me to be grateful for the good health I have. It also made me aware of a disease I would have never heard of if I had never read her book. Since a lot of her story was told from the perspective of those around her at the time, I think some of this memoir could have been fiction in order to blend the story together.

Susannah's memoir wouldn't transfer to a blog very well, most of it is told from other people, so I can't see how she would be able to write out exactly what is happening to her while it is going on in real-time. If the cases were different, and she was able to remember and articulate what was happening to her while it was happening to her, then yes, this could have been a very interesting blog piece.