THE MOTH: 50 Extraordinary True Stories

I love telling stories. I love listening to stories. To me, stories are the fibres of communication which allow you to understand someone a little better. Good stories can give you a glimpse into the lives of others and maybe, just maybe, allow you to see what the world looks like through the someone else’s eyes. They can allow you to impart information that you have learned in a more immediate way, that might impact the listener just a little bit more effectively. They can give clues to what others find important. They can help you to evaluate your own life and the events in it through a slightly different prism. They can make you realise that whatever your own trials and tribulations and love and laughter and life and happiness and sadness and ups and downs, others are going through the same things, just in their own unique way. They connect us.

Therefore, The Moth, I feel, should be a book that I fall in love with. A book with a clever yet deceptively simple premise. A book that offers myriad windows into lives outside my own. And yet I find that I do not like this book. It does not engage me so much as aggravate me. It does not deliver. Why not?

Let’s go back a bit and explain what The Moth actually is. The Moth is not originally a book. It is a live storytelling event that started in New York and spread to cities around the US, before migrating to others countries. It encourages people from all walks of life and all professions to stand up in front of a room full of strangers and tell them a story from their own life. The stories can be funny, sad, bizarre, mundane, challenging; it doesn’t matter.   What matters is that the story is true and is about the person telling it. At Moth events anyone can volunteer to tell a story, and everyone is given a set amount of time to tell it. The narrators of the stories that engage most with the audience are then encouraged the shape their stories to their maximum impact with the help of Moth directors, who help you to tell them better.Now back to the book. There are a number of reasons why it doesn’t work for me. Here’s one: putting spoken words to paper dilutes the immediacy of the voice that is telling the story. Transcribing the spoken word to paper uses certain techniques, such as starting a sentence with ‘And…’: ‘And the other guy says …’; ‘And a couple of things really struck me …’; ‘And I got to thirty and …’. After all while, using the same techniques starts to make all the voices of the stories the same – and they are definitely not.

The voices become even more homogenised because they are almost all American. There is a kind of editorial sameness about each of the stories, regardless of their widly differing topics or varied speakers. Could this be because of the way their stories have been shaped by the Moth directors? Or because they (almost) all carry the same cultural underpinnings which I, living in a society with many of the same underpinnings as the US, already recognise? For me this homogeneity makes the stories less engaging and interesting; they are less raw, less human, less original, less the voice that is telling them. One exception is a story from a Tajik teacher, written with a sense of fatalism that I don’t recognise about a place and a time I have never experienced. My lack of recognition or experience makes her story more interesting to me somehow: it introduces the very tiniest of glimpses into a culture that I don’t know about, and just the tiniest understanding what it must be like to live in such an environment. This is important to me because the assumptions this story makes of the landscape in which it is being told are not assumptions I recognise. But maybe, one day, I will come up against that landscape, and this story may help me to navigate it just a tiny bit better.  

Something else I imagine the talks do better than the book is in giving you an immediate introduction to the storyteller the moment they come on the stage. You learn a lot about someone from their body language, clothing, hair style and such like before they even open their mouths. With the book, although the name of the storyteller is included at the beginning of each story, the details about them (a photo and short biography) are left until the end. Although this treatment in the book allows you to read the story without so many unconscious stereotypes (about race, gender, social status etc.), at the same time those preconceptions can also be important in not confusing your understanding of the story. Gender, for example. Several of the stories that I had assumed were written by one gender were actually written by another, and having to go back and re-evaluate my understanding of the relationships in the story based on this new information was occasionally frustrating and detracted from the narrative.

As I reached the end of the book, the biographical details of each storyteller began to frustrate me in a different manner: it seemed as though most narrators were well-known for telling stories in some way. The stories may have been about a time before they were storytellers, but the biographies catalogued large numbers of writers or screenwriters, film makers and performers, award-winning correspondents or journalists. Or if not storytellers then at people hugely successful in their fields; conservationists or heart surgeons, athletes or rap stars, astronauts or politicians. I am never going to be a heart surgeon or an athlete. I don’t know what those lives look like. Instead I imagine I can relate much more easily to someone who isn’t ‘successful’ but who can tell a great story. As I read, therefore, I kept hoping that I would read next about someone with an extraordinary story from an unextraordinary life - someone who could see and portray small details from their lives in a way that would open a glimpse to me, the reader, of why these were extraordinary moments to them.

Finally, the collection itself. In my opinion, telling stories should bring us together and connect us in some way through the act, rather than the consequences of telling that story. However I came away feeling that if I took part in a Moth story night, rather than opening myself up to allow people to get a glimpse of my universe, instead I would be entering into competition with the other story tellers for who had the story with most heart, most pathos, most wry amusement, most self-reflection.  And that my story would be given a spurious value by the people who were listening, who would then make a judgment as to whether my story was ‘important’ enough to be tampered with, polished, tarted up. By the end I realised that, while reading The Moth, I was also starting to look at my life through the prism of what my ‘best’ stories were, rather than the ones which had most meaning to me. And that I was deciding what stories were ‘best’ based on the arbitrary framework of The Moth. In short, the book felt like a competition of who’s story was ‘best’ rather than a celebration everyone’s stories.

Having now criticised the book, I will make a confession; I have never been to a Moth night. I haven’t seen how the original premise works. I believe (and hope) it works significantly better than the book. I would like to experience the stories being told first-hand, told by people from a similar cultural background to myself (British rather than American). I would like to experience the sense of connection that telling stories face to face with each other brings. I would like to get glimpses of other peoples’ lives, and perhaps even share a glimpse of myself. I would like to share stories with people who aren’t storytellers, and who describe everyday ordinary things in a different way. But even though I haven’t (yet) been to a Moth night I already feel that participating face to face will provide me with a huge amount more of value than reading a book of the same stories. This is a strange idea to me – I am a by nature and by profession an avid reader. But maybe some stories are better left said than written.  

A postscript: having read the book of the course of a few days, I am surprised to recall very few of the stories. The story that I recall most for the welter of emotion in it (wry surprise, amusement, slight umbrage, self-depricating humour, a beautiful turn of phrase) is actually the introduction by Neil Gaiman. I am a huge Gaiman fan, it must be said; his ideas are inspirational and his writing immensely readable. However, his description of being approached by the Moth to write the foreword to this book, and then finding that they wanted to polish his story is the one that really sticks. Maybe it’s because it stands outside the Moth ‘format’. Maybe it’s because Gaiman is a truly brilliant writer and conveys emotion through words in a way that few of us can. Or maybe it’s because it is my stance; his foreword conveys the joy and importance of story-telling while also questioning whether it is really possible to quantify a value for each story. And whether you really should.