The things that divide us

Yesterday I finished telling Erica's story. I think the writing went pretty well, though the end felt a little rushed for some reason. I need to write to Erica and find out what she thought. (I'm pleased to say Alice liked her story.) It's difficult to write stories from other people's lives, because even fifty minutes is not a tenth of the time it would take to really understand everything in full context, and I don't have my interviewee here to correct me as I write -- "oh, it didn't really happen like that, though." As I wrote I thought of many questions that went unasked during my interview with Erica, interesting tensions I could have teased out. I realized that there is no such thing as a biographical vignette. A life is like a wiki, everything linked to everything else, and to understand one thing really you need to understand everything. So in the end any vignette is only a sketch, incomplete, suggesting the reality, hinting at it, maybe caricaturing it, but not really encapsulating it. For that you would need a book. No, a book is not enough. You'd need to live it. And even then.

This is actually a fairly substantial obstacle for me. My two subjects so far have been my age, my race, and approximately my culture, not to mention that they're my friends. If I'm worried that I don't have the proper context for telling their stories right, what the hell am I going to do when I interview a fifty-year-old black Baptist in Memphis or an Orthodox Jewish Holocaust survivor in Brooklyn? I talked a while ago about how love transcends such barriers, but its circumstances don't. The greater the divide between my background and the other person's, the more I will take for granted that I shouldn't, and the more they'll assume I can take for granted that I won't.

What's more, it's hard to approach a person you expect will be dissimilar from you. Tonight I visited a local New Age shop I probably end up in on some afternoon once every couple months to buy incense or admire the pewter figurines. I'm on their mailing list, and tonight they had a party for their owner's birthday, so I stopped by. In the best case, I hoped to do an interview; in the worst, at least I'd get some experience managing crowds. Well, I didn't get my interview. Partly that's because it was noisy, but really it was that the people there were mostly hardcore New Agers and at least fifteen years older than me. I did have a couple conversations, but for one reason or another I didn't feel like asking either of the people I talked to for an interview. I was intimidated and I wasn't really sure I wanted to hear their stories. This is a problem. I have a couple solutions I'm turning over in my head, but I think I'll avail myself of the weekend to think more about them before talking them out here.