Rachel Simon's Blog

Could there be a better way to kick off the release of the paperback of The Story of Beautiful Girl than to get interviewed by Judy Woodruff on the PBS News Hour?

Yesterday I flew to Colorado. I’m currently in Boulder, getting ready for a talk tonight. After another talk on Sunday, I begin my book tour on Monday. (To see where I’ll be going, check out my Appearance page on my website.) I’ll blog whenever I get the time.

But earlier this week, on Tuesday, I went to Washington, DC and taped the interview. It was an honor to meet Judy Woodruff, not only because she’s a legendary journalist who I’ve admired for years, but because she has a personal connection to disability.

The interview aired last night, Feb. 9, 2012. To watch it, click on this link. Enjoy!

Everyone’s talking about Shirley Sherrod right now. Not only is this former Agriculture Department official the latest in a series of unknown individuals to find herself cannon-shot to the top of the most emailed news items in the country. She is also the subject of one analysis after another about just what her tale has revealed about our culture.

As we all came to learn, the clip we saw of Shirley Sherrod was not a statement of who she is. It was just the first paragraph of the story she was telling. Breitbart and company were conscious of the fact that they were presenting only that first paragraph. So why was so much of the country, not to mention the administration, so ready to buy what they were saying?

Yes, it’s partially about us not being in a post-racial world. It’s partially about the cleverness of the right wing media machine, the timidity of the Obama administration, and the effectiveness of highly selective video clips.

But I think it’s also about the growing tendency we have as a society to think in terms of nuggets of information, sound bytes, Wikipedia entries, bullet points, and the like – and to glaze over when faced with an actual story.

The initial clip wasn’t only a short glimpse of a longer talk. It was an early moment in a longer story: the moment when the protagonist reveals the shortcomings in her character that will be challenged by the story that lies ahead. It is like the moment when we realize that Nick Carroway is dazzled by the mysterious and charismatic Jay Gatsby. When we understand that Ebenezer Scrooge is a heartless miser who disdains every aspect of Christmas day. When a bitter Rick, who runs a cafe in Casablanca, insists that he is neutral on all matters involving war.

Yet the original assumption made by so many of my fellow citizens was that there was no story. The clip was it, clean and simple. If there was more, it would be only more of the same. It couldn’t possibly be a story.

Why was this assumption made? As a writer of memoirs and novels, I think a great deal about how stories develop from a starting point through an increasingly complex middle to an ending point. This was true of stories in the oral tradition before the advent of writing, and it’s still true of many stories now. My own pet theory about why we’ve always organized experience into story is that story is at the essence of our humanity: we are born, we go through an increasingly complex middle, and we die. Each of our lives is a story.

To my recollection, when I was starting out as a writer in the late 1980s, the average person spent much more time reading books and newspaper stories, listening to friends tell stories, and sitting through a movie from beginning to end. The kind of interruptions we have today – incoming email, ringing cell phones, beeping text messages – didn’t exist. Certainly people were getting phone calls and using the remote control, but it seems that patience was more widespread. When people sat down for a story, there was the expectation that there was much more to the story than the beginning, or any single moment, and that they needed to let things unfold to take it all in.

There were also more stories, at least in print. Back then, when I told people I wanted to be a writer, they assumed, correctly, that I meant a writer of fiction. Now, when I say I am a writer, they assume I write short, informational, skimmable pieces that rely on bullet points and are about very familiar topics: health, style, sports, parenting. In other words, the kind of categories that are easily searchable, and the kind of articles that deliver facts or advice. The assumption is that readers should expect to parachute into what I write on any sentence, and link away from it on any other. The assumption is not that there are some forms of communication that can’t truly be understood without a commitment from first word to last – and yes, without bullet points and without skimmable middles.

I also noticed, in the years when I was teaching writing on the college level, that every fall I had more students who didn’t quite understand what a story was. They got that it presented a situation. But the idea that the character would go through a series of events – or even one – and would come out changed (or making a decision to remain unchanged), was new to them. It seemed they’d spent so much of their young lives listening to and watching people state positions, rather than tell stories that called those positions into question, that they couldn’t get their minds to work any other way.

In addition, I started to notice that when I asked people if they’d read such and such books, they sometimes said yes when really they’d meant that they’d leafed through. Once I asked a friend if he’d read a certain large book that was popular at the time. He said he had, but when I asked him what he liked about it, he groped so inarticulately for an answer that I said, “Wait. I thought you said you’d read it.” He responded, with a defensive tone in his voice, “Well, not every page.”

As one friend of mine pointed out when we were discussing the Shirley Sherrod incident, “Our country is still very racist and a great deal of the racism is because we don’t hear the whole story. A story has many parts.” I agree. Without getting the whole story, we allow racism – and so many other quick and easy judgments – to thrive. We do our fellow humans a disservice and an injustice.

We need to be careful. The people who show us clips in the interest of making a quick point know that many of us are have lost the patience we once gave to stories, and are willing to accept a single moment as representative of the whole. They also know that many in the media are so overworked that they might just present the same clip, with the same point, without any independent examination.

Shirley Sherrod is not the first person to suffer because of someone exploiting our impatience. But maybe her tale can make us remind ourselves, consciously and loudly and as a culture, that when we see a disturbing excerpt of a longer presentation, someone might be trying to manipulate us.

If we don’t remember that, then we’re talking about a lot more than race, media, or politics. We’re talking about our very humanity.