JOYCE MAYNARD A STORYTELLING LIFE

BECAUSE THIS IS about living one’s life as a storyteller, I’ll begin with a story. It’s about the person who taught me how to tell a story: my mother. She was a difficult woman in many ways—a difficult person to have as a mother, anyway—demanding, guilt-inspiring, largely oblivious to the concept of a child’s privacy, sometimes overinvolved to the point of inducing claustrophobia. What saved our relationship was the expansiveness of her spirit, her incorrigible sense of humor, and—this most of all—her tireless need to explore life and seek out the story of everyone she met. She was a lover of literature, but nothing any fiction writer ever created fascinated her as much as the adventures of real people. I never met anyone who could tell a story as well as she did.
      The way my school classmates were taught by their parents how to play ball or ski, I was coached in the art of telling stories. Pace and voice, choice of language, what to include, what to withhold and when. My mother didn’t believe in euphemisms. (“Say ‘die,’ not ‘pass away,’” she’d tell me.) Child of the Depression, she favored economy over adverbs. (“You’re taking your reader to the bathroom,” my mother said of a passage in which I labored too long over the chronology of each event. “Do your job well with all the other parts of speech, and you won’t need adverbs.” Forty years later, it is a rare event to find an “ly” word in any story I tell.)
      But I learned more than craft under my mother’s ceaseless tutelage. She instructed me in the essence of what well-told stories are meant to accomplish—the idea that the joy of writing well might actually redeem and even trump the raw material of painful experience, thereby revealing deeply meaningful truths to the reader. Days when I’d come home from school, upset by some injustice or the hurtful behavior of a friend, my mother’s words of consolation seldom varied. “Never mind,” she said. “You can always write about it.”
      Then she went about the business of teaching me how—by her own extraordinary example, most of all. Later in life, once my sister and I were grown, our mother published books of her own. But it may be that her finest creative work took place on those thousand and one nights she presided over our dinner table, entertaining and instructing us with her stories.
      Both of us are writers now.

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