How Storytelling Evolves, and the Main Character Becomes an Agent

I ran into a friend at my athletic club last night, as he was wrapping up a business networking event. He asked me, “what’s new?” And I told him my book would be published soon. He’s a marketing guy and launched into many questions about the book writing process, the “arc of the story, or stories,” in a book, and more.

Quite coincidentally that night I was sorting phone photos from my recent trip to Portugal and came across a photo I took from an article I read a year ago in the Wall Street Journal. This is what the caption said in my photo:

“But at a certain point, I’d crossed a threshold. The unimaginable – living without Seth – became, simply, life. I even found love again. I even got married.

As a health reporter, I wrote years ago about a study that showed the psychological benefits of storytelling. I was fascinated by research that found that people felt differently about themselves and their lives when they reframed their stories so that they were agents, not victims or bystanders. Essentially, the story matters less than how we tell it to ourselves.

For years, I told a story defined by what I missed, what I lost, what I failed to see. This was inevitable but……..”

WOW!

The writer is journalist Rachel Zimmerman, and from her book: Us, After; A Memoir of Love and Suicide. It chronicles her life and grieving process following the death of her husband, Seth Teller. In July 2024, the WSJ published an essay by her, “A Decade Ago, My Husband Killed Himself. Could I Have Stopped It?

I post this in In Between Drinks because the way she described storytelling is an insightful and articulate way of addressing the question my friend, Ernest, asked me.

Agents, not victims or bystanders. That’s a good way to think of the main character in this book, Henry Ford Johnson.