Life is in the Narrative
Do you spend time at the close of a year sitting and summarising? What you’ve done, where you’ve been and who you’ve become over the course of 12 months? I do, as the only way I know to try and digest the road just travelled. Not to mention remembering it. Waking up for the first time back home in London this week, my husband rolled over and confessed he’d just had a very strange dream. “I dreamt that we just spent a year at Harvard…”
Walking through bustling, Christmas-sparkling London yesterday, Cambridge suddenly began to feel very far away. Despite cheerful appearances, buzzing restaurants and a plethora of Santa hats, the news here is inexorably awful. The nurses are striking for the first time in their history; post-Brexit, suicidal Britain is economically trailing its peers; and trying to pick up my much-awaited daughter at Heathrow yesterday morning we gave up - we couldn’t get to the terminal for traffic jams. She met us a tube stop in…
But then, the story you tell is a question of perspective. A friend just texted me about her delightful visit to London, complete with a violin master class at Bearde’s and then theatre, to see &Juliet. Sometimes, you get what you are looking for.
Of Chiefs & Presidents
So here, I just want to grab and hold some positive news amidst the blasts of cold reality sweeping across Europe. A double dose. First, Harvard has a new President, Claudine Gay, who is the university’s first Black leader in 386 years - and its second female President. Women now lead four of the eight Ivy League schools, and about a third of all US universities. (The state with the most female college presidents is … Texas!)
Second, with the recent appointment of the Sunday Times’ Emma Tucker to be Editor in Chief of the Wall Street Journal, women are now running some of the English world’s top papers. She joins Zanny Minton Beddoes at The Economist, Roula Khalaf at the Financial Times and Katharine Viner at The Guardian. Not so long ago, women used to run women’s magazines, now they are steadily moving across the mainstream press.
Education and media are powerful forces. The stories we tell and those we believe are powerfully shaped by both. As these organisations gender balance, it will be fascinating to see if and how their coverage shifts. The FT’s Khalaf thinks capitalism needs a reset. Does Tucker agree? We could desperately need some new perspectives that are more inclusive of a broader range of voices - for the world and for ourselves. And when will the US be ready to move from female college Presidents to… President?
What’s Your Story?
We spent time during our year at Harvard shaping the narrative of our lives and their connection to our social impact projects. Marshall Ganz specialises in digging deep within oneself for messages that mobilise people and movements. In coaching midlifers, I find people’s narratives (and associated challenges of self-perception) are some of the biggest obstacles to dreaming big and stretching forward. Narrative blocks and powerful self-judgement are often buried deep within ancient, often unacknowledged, wounds. A few encounters this week brought this theme to the fore, just as I was wrestling with writing a summary of one hell of a year - of personal transition in a context of global shifts, crises and war.
Watching ‘She Said’
This movie is a tale of stories untold, shamed and silenced by NDAs and dirty money. Women who not only never got to tell their tale - they never really got to live it. Superficially, it’s the story of Harvey Weinstein’s undoing by two dedicated New York Times Journalists (Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey). But really, it’s a painstaking tale of the hunt for the hidden darkness that blanketed so many women in silence for so long. With outlandishly constructed contracts accompanied by hush money and generous dollops of shame, the system that allowed Weinstein to run rampant is described in gory detail. He was far from alone. It takes a village to raise good women - and destroy them.
Weinstein never appears in this well-paced film directed by Maria Schrader, except once from the back. It’s not really about him. But about the devastating impact he had on the lives of the women who eventually accused him of abuse (all 83 of them). “Measured and deliberate, the film avoids grandstanding, speaking in low tones where another movie might shout,” rightly summarises the NYT review. It’s really an anatomy of silence. What we lose when voices are quieted before they were even found.
Reading ‘Lessons’ by Ian McEwan
British novelist Ian McEwan’s latest novel is an epic, 500-page narrative of a man’s life as he nears his latter years. As the narrative of men’s lives often are, it is set in historical and political context, across a Boomer’s 70-year lifespan, from the post-war period to the present. This man is no hero, and reportedly McEwan flirts with the shadow side of his own life. The ‘what if’s’ of roads he luckily didn’t take. His anti-hero Roland Baines is depicted as a dilapidated, self-hating loser, someone who has stumbled through life and women without ever really finding his feet - or his path.
Like She Said, it is anchored in a tale of youthful trauma and sexual abuse - and meticulously describes the lasting harm that forever shadows relationships and self-belief. Except this time it’s a female abuser to a young boy, as McEwan didn’t want to be caught ‘appropriating’ another gender’s tale in this politically correct age. Yet his troubled start fundamentally ‘rewires his brain’ says his first wife, who abandons him to his uninspiring fate - and to her own stellar rise to fame.
A fascinating comment on how one ageing male novelist writes what it takes for people, especially women, to succeed: abandon family and children. Luckily, this aspect of his tale may be a bit dated, given the news above. But the struggle of men in a society where women are both blossoming and voraciously dangerous is sadly all too accurate - and painfully penned.
Theatre The Life of Pi
Our last evening in Cambridge, we went to see this play, a puppet-infused parable about the stories we tell. Another story of a man looking back on his life, and his adventures emigrating to Canada from India as a boy. Shipwrecked and finding himself in a boat with a bunch of wild animals who gradually kill each other, he is left with a fearsome tiger whom he timidly feeds and tames - and who eventually returns the favour by saving his life.
But when salvaged from the sea and trying to share his fantastical tale, a metaphor for faith, the rational folk can’t believe him. Not until he changes the wild characters to more mundane (and believably horrible) humans.
And so, a third reminder that who tells the story - and who hears it - both impact whether it is believed. And whether you even think it’s worth telling.
One of the gifts of elderberries has been to share my internal, stream of consciousness meanderings through the roller coaster of a year. You, dear Reader, have given it new life and meaning by reading it and letting it bounce off your own story. Often adding layers to my telling with your reactions, echoes and parallel paths. The reading validates the telling. And creates a tribe that share the questions and ideas embedded in the words.
As I listened to my Harvard colleagues carefully craft their stories over the course of 2022, they steadily got more convinced, then more convincing, then truly powerful.
Is it time your story was told? Even if only for yourself. And heard? If only for the people you know and love. An older friend is carefully writing a long, memory-laden letter to his children. I wish my mother had written her extraordinary life. I fear she didn’t think it was worth the telling. It would have been worth so much, to me.
“We live in the stories we tell ourselves,” says Grant Morrison. Most memoirs (and 75% of new fiction) are written by women, and mostly read by women. Collectively, we’re still a very new voice in the world. But we’re telling our tales. And, slowly but surely, getting heard and shaping the conversation.
Beautiful. Thanks for sharing the journey