Bruce Feiler - Life Is in the Transitions

The First Love Story

The Secrets of Happy Families

The Council of Dads

Americas Prophet

Where God Was Born

Abraham

Walking the Bible

Dreaming Out Loud

Under the Big Top

Looking for Class

Learning to Bow

I used to believe that phone calls dont change your life, until one day I got a phone call that did. It was from my mother. Your father is trying to kill himself.

Hes what?

Suddenly she was talking and I wasnt really following. Something about a bathroom, a razor, a desperate lunge for relief.

Good God.

And that wasnt the last time. Later he tried to climb out of a window while I was scrambling eggs.

As a writer, Im often asked whether I learned to write from my dad. The answer is no. My father was uncommonly friendly, even twinklingwe called him a professional Savannahian, for the seaside city in Georgia where hed lived for eighty yearsbut he was more of a listener and a doer than a teller and a scribbler. A navy veteran, civic leader, Southern Democrat, he was never depressed a minute in his life.

Until he got Parkinsons, a disease that affects your mobilityand your mood. My dads father, who also got the disease late in life, shot himself in the head a month before I graduated from high school. My father had promised for years he wouldnt do the same. I know the painand shameit causes.

Then he changed his mindor at least that part of his mind he could still control. Ive lived a full life, he said. I dont want to be mourned; I want to be celebrated.

Six times in the next twelve weeks my father attempted to end his life. We tried every remedy imaginable, from counseling to electroconvulsive therapy. Yet we couldnt surmount his core challenge: He had lost a reason to live.

My family, always a bit hyperfunctional, dove in. My older brother took over the family real estate business; my younger sister helped research medical treatments.

But Im the narrative guy. For three decades, I had devoted my life to exploring the stories that give our lives meaningfrom the tribal gatherings of the ancient world to the chaotic family dinners of today. I have long been consumed by how stories connect and divide us on a societal level, how they define and deflate us on a personal level.

Given this interest, I began to wonder: If my dad was facing a narrative problem, at least in part, maybe it demanded a narrative solution. Maybe what my father needed was a spark to restart his life story.

One Monday morning I sat down and did the simplest, most restorative thing I could imagine.

I sent my dad a question.

What were your favorite toys as a child?

What happened next changed not only him, but everyone around him, and ultimately led me to reevaluate how we all achieve meaning, balance, and joy in our lives.

This is the story of what happened next, and what we all can learn from it.

This is the story of the Life Story Project.

Stop for a second and listen to the story going on in your head. Its there, somewhere, in the background. Its the story you tell others when you first meet them; its the story you tell yourself when you visit a meaningful place, when you flip through old photographs, when you celebrate an achievement, when you rush to the hospital.

Its the story of who you are, where you came from, where you dream of going in the future.

Its the high point of your life, the low point, the turning point.

Its what you believe in, what you fight for, what matters most to you.

Its the story of your life.

And that story isnt just part of you. It is you in a fundamental way.

Life is the story you tell yourself.

But how you tell that storyare you a hero, victim, lover, warrior, caretaker, believermatters a great deal. How you adapt that storyhow you revise, rethink, and rewrite your personal narrative as things change, lurch, or go wrong in your lifematters even more.

Recently, something happened to me that made me focus on these issues: I lost control of that story bouncing around in my head. For a while, I didnt know who I was; I didnt know where I was going.

I was lost.

Thats when I began to realize: While storytelling has drawn significant academic and popular interest in recent years, theres an aspect of personal storytelling that hasnt gotten enough attention. What happens when we misplace the plot of our lives? When we get sidetracked by one of the mishaps, foul-ups, or reversals of fortune that appear with uncomfortable frequency these days?

What happens when our fairy tales go awry?

Thats what happened to my dad that fall, to me around that time, to all of us at one time or another.

We get stuck in the woods and cant get out.

This time, though, I decided to do something about it. I set out to learn how to get unstuck.

What I did nexttraveling around the country, gathering hundreds of life stories of everyday people, and then scouring those stories for themes and takeaways that could help all of us navigate the swerves in our liveshas a bit of a backstory.

I was born in Savannah, Georgia, to five generations of Southern Jews. Thats two storytelling traditions of outsiders that collided in me. I left the South and moved north for college, then left college and moved to Japan. There, in a town fifty miles and fifty years from Tokyo, I began writing letters home on crinkly airmail paper. Youre not going to believe what happened to me today. When I got back home, everywhere I went, people said, I loved your letters!

Thats great, I said. Have we met?

Turns out my grandmother had xeroxed my letters and passed them around. They went viral the old-fashioned way. If so many people find these interesting, I should write a book, I thought. With some luck, I landed a book contract. More important, Id found a calling. Stories were how Id always found myself. How I put my unease and outsiderness into coherent form.

Over the next two decades, I wrote storiesbooks, articles, televisionfrom six continents and seventy-five countries. I spent a year as a circus clown and another traveling with Garth Brooks. I retraced the greatest stories ever told, from Noahs ark to the Exodus. I also got married and became the father to identical twin girls. Life was ascending.