Alison McMahan's Writing

Why do we tell stories?

One reason is product placement. We're the product, and the story is the branding.

Stories say who we wish we were but they also say something about who we wish we were not. Which is to say, who we actually are. There is a story in Macbeth about three witches who share one eye between them, and take turns passing it around. The eye is like a talking stick, as the one who wields it gets to tell the story of what she sees.

This is much like real life: storytelling used to be a communal service that we provided for each other, and now, like so much in our lives, it has become institutionalized, all the eyes we once had reduced to just one eye that only gives us brief, intermittent, and unreliable glimpses of what the world puts before us.

The thing about stories that are repressed is that they always get out. In the end, the only way to explain ourselves is with a story. Or, with many stories, the told shadowed by the untold.