In Fog Of Disbelief, Carl Pillitteri describes his experience as an engineer at the Fukushima nuclear power plant as the earthquakes hit. His descriptions were vivid and exciting:
The concrete floor and the walls around us began to crack, and sections of ductwork were coming down, and the lights, the lights were dropping everywhere. The huge, vast space that we were in quickly filled with what I first thought was smoke, but was actually a thick cloud of dust that was being thrown airborne from this huge structure getting the living hell shook out of it.After escaping the building and then watching the tsunami that first filled the horizon from north to south with a flood of water and then sucked the water back out with it – leaving nothing but seabed filling the horizon from north to south – Pillitteri tried calling his wife for hours, but all the networks were busy. Finally making a connection, “When I said her name, she just screamed and kept screaming.” And, yep, that made me cry; thinking that's exactly how I'd react in that situation.
In Walking With RJ, Stephanie Peirolo writes about a terrible car accident her son, RJ, survived. And despite her being the vice president of a company with what she had assumed was excellent health insurance, it wasn't enough to cover his lengthy rehab or further years of nursing care (we don't have everything covered here in Canada, but this particular story could never play out here and it appalled me). Mistakes are made and RJ dies and Peirolo writes:
Most days I wake up, and the world is so diminished without him in it, it's like there's been a total eclipse of the sun. Only I'm the only one who can see it, and I know the light is never coming back.And that made me cry, thinking about losing one of my own kids to bureaucratic sleaziness. But not all of the stories are sad. In Go The %&# To Sleep, Adam Mansbach writes about the sudden fame and notoriety he received after writing a certain parodic children's book, jokingly pushing back to critics, “It would take a very special blend of literacy and illiteracy to mistakenly read this book to a child.” This story had me smiling throughout as Mansbach co-hosted a parenting conference with Dr Ferber (of the Ferber Method for sleep training babies) and he had to wonder if he was qualified to stand on stage alongside the doctor, concluding:
Maybe I'm not actually faking this. Maybe we're all faking this equally. And maybe I do know a couple of things. Like keep your sense of humor at all costs. Or embrace the absurdity of the situations in which you find yourself. Or even, realize that there are worse things than spending two hours trapped in a room with the person you love most in the world.And the most devastating story I read here was A Phone Call by Auburn Sandstrom. In it, she writes that when she hit rock bottom – as her mother warned her that one day she would – she decided to finally call the phone number of a Christian counselor whose number her mother had pressed on her years before. Waking the man at two in the morning, she explained that she needed to talk, and the man told her to go ahead. After spending hours describing her drug addictions, the abuse she suffered from her husband, and her neglect of her baby in pursuit of her highs, Sandstrom was impressed by how supportive and present the counselor was; saying at the end that if he needed to give her some Bible verses, she'd probably even read them. The man paused awkwardly and says, “I'm so afraid to tell you this. But the number you called...” he pauses again. “You got the wrong number.” That gutted me; I was completely floored by the idea of Sandstrom reaching out from her rock bottom and a complete stranger lifting her up.
This is what I know. In the deepest, blackest night of despair, if you can just get one pinhole of light...all of grace rushes in.Grace is the word. As for the other stories – I should have been moved by Ishmael Beah (the former child soldier of A Long Way Gone fame) and his tale of trying to fit in with his high school peers in America – and not wanting them to know why he's so good at a paint ball war if he's never played before – but it didn't really work for me (yet, I bet I would cry if I saw him tell it live). It was surprising/not surprising to me that Meg Wolitzer's story of a summer camp landed better than Louis CK's narrative of a trip he took to Moscow just as the Soviet Union was breaking apart; Louis CK is a master oral storyteller, but print is Wolitzer's milieu and her story just worked better on the page. George Dawes Green, founder of The Moth, tells a polished and interesting tale of the time he spent living in a mausoleum as a teenager; I would hope his story would stand out in what is technically his own collection. As for others unknown to me, Josh Bond tells an exciting story of being an ordinary citizen helping the FBI to bring in a dangerous fugitive, Sara Barron's voice was engaging and authentic in her story of dealing with her husband's ex-wife, and Christian Garland – a participant in The Moth's inaugural New York City High School GrandSLAM – tells a story full of heart and teenaged exuberance; I could hear these voices coming off the page. Ultimately, this doesn't work completely as a book – I'm going to look into the podcast, see if there will be a live show coming near me anytime soon – but I'm glad to have become familiar with the work that The Moth does and don't regret reading the bits that worked for me.
