#15 – The allure of origin stories
On telling truth through myths.
Hey everyone!
This essay is inspired by a writing prompt from Suleika Jaoud’s Isolation Journals, references Jonathan Franzen’s epic novel, Freedom, and includes tender moments (and vintage photos!) from my short yet defining relationship with my dad. It took me forever to feel happy with some semblance of a conclusion. I hope you like it!
Take good care and blessings e beijos do Rio,
Jodi
As a kid, I couldn’t get enough of my dad. From joyriding in his antique blue Oldsmobile to dipping our pinky fingers into the jelly of sticky danishes, of all the things I loved doing with him, making a fire was my favourite.
The production started in our backyard. I’d waddle behind him as he slipped his gigantic hands into gigantic gardening gloves, and grabbed the axe to chop firewood. I loved listening to the sound of the wood splintering open, loved watching the logs roll gently along until they eventually landed in stillness, loved the rhythm of our dusk-lit ritual.
When he was done, he’d toss the firewood in our wheelbarrow and then plunk me on top. As the sun set, darkening the branches of towering walnuts that I swore touched heaven, my dad would snicker at my mom, busy inside making dinner with my younger brother wrapped around her hip. It was on one of those wheelbarrow rides that I learned the term “battle-axe” – noting, to my juvenile surprise, it wasn’t a weapon, but a term of endearment. Unable to not follow my dad’s footsteps, I yelled it back.
“Ken!” my mom yelled, her voice twisted in surprise, wrapped in disapproval.
His crackling laugh cut through the crisp, fall air, “Atta girl, sweetheart.”
While there are so many others, it was this memory that first came to mind as I worked on a writing prompt from Suleika Jaoud’s Isolation Journals:
Write your origin story—maybe the story of your nation, or your city, or your family, or yourself. Write it as myth: distilled and symbolic. Capture the essence of where you’ve come from, and let it tell you where to go.
When I told my mom I was writing an essay about making fires with dad, she giggled, let her mind audibly drift back in time for a moment and said, “I think I have a picture of you two together.”
“In the White Rock house?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice muffled by the crinkly rip of an old, plastic sheet lifting in one of our family albums. “Found it!”
We say a picture is a thousand words. I sometimes think that's true, but not always. When I look back at this picture, I can’t help but think about how much it’s missing – the heavy, sugary smell of rum on my dad’s breath as he taught me how to blow, gently, on the fire; the comforting shield of his undivided attention on a young fire, slowly settling into something smaller, something steady, and finally into silent admiration; the gentle fall of fresh snow, quickly evaporating as it hit the warm, west coast earth. But does my little origin story tell that much more?
Writing our personal stories, in diary entries, Substack newsletters, or full-on award-winning memoirs, has all kinds of creative and existential benefits. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since developing a public writing habit it’s that reflecting on where we come from and crafting a narrative out of it is less about finding essential truth than it is an opportunity to make peace with our ego’s insatiable craving for survival. For me, the allure of origin stories resides in the biggest myth of all – I exist independent of my immediate interactions, experiences, and relationships.
I exist outside of right now.
Cruising around in a wheelbarrow and learning how to make a fire by my dad’s side is just one version of who I am and where I came from. It’s just one, once upon a time.
If identification with our thoughts and feelings is ego-affirming, as I for one have come to believe, it’s a good reminder to be critical about our motivations and intentions when we look backwards, when we reflect, and certainly when we write about all that. Writing about our past can be generous, but it can also be in vain.
In this way, I adore the way Jonathan Franzen in Freedom incorporates one of the main character’s trials and tribulations with life-writing, couching it in the belief that the act of writing in and of itself is liberating:
“There was a little while, around the time we moved to Washington, when she seemed to be doing better. She’d seen a therapist in St. Paul who got her started on some kind of writing project. Some kind of personal history or life journal that she was very mum and secretive about. As long as she was working on that, things weren’t so bad.”
But even better yet, I love how Franzen gets uber meta, and self-reflexively refers to the character as “the autobiographer”:
“Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.”
Looking back at one of my favourite origin stories, does it tell me anything essential about where I’ve come from? It certainly gives a glimmer of some heteronormative rituals that subconsciously informed my childhood worldview, and probably still kick around today in my immediate reactions. But to the extent that it touches on something essential, I can’t help but think it’s not the content or the story that matter so much. It’s the suspension of intimate experience we feel when we read. Maybe, if there’s any fundamental truth we uncover in origin stories, it’s how alive we feel when we filter out our distractions, preoccupations, and incessant thoughts, and simply listen to what our senses are telling us.
What a lovely and moving piece, Jodi. I have tears in my eyes. So delicate.