David Eagleman reviews The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall

Have I ever mentioned (oh, yes, I know I have) how much I love the book section of the Gray Lady?  I start looking for the online version of the coming Sunday's edition on Thursday, even though it's most often not posted until late Friday afternoon.  I scan the headlines on my computer once the edition is posted, then take my pink-covered iPad to a safe place and tap in.

Often I return to the old Mac to shout out a favorite couple of passages.  Last week I was talking about Judith Warner's review of Madeline Levine's Teach Your Children Well.  Today I'm sharing two passages from David Eagleman's review of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human, a Jonathan Gottschall book.  We readers and writers like to talk about these things.  We like to agree or not agree.  

 

I rather like, here, that stories have been declared as important as genes.  I like that they aren't time wasters.  And you?

But not all stories are created equal. Gottschall points out that for a story to work, it has to possess a particular morality. To capture and influence, it can’t be plagued with moral repugnance — involving, say, a sexual love story between a mother and her son, or a good guy who becomes crippled and a bad guy who profits handsomely. If the narrative doesn’t contain the suitable kind of virtue, brains don’t absorb it. The story torpedo misses the exposed brain vent. (There are exceptions, Gottschall allows, but they only prove the rule.) 

 

This leads to the suggestion that story’s role is “intensely moralistic.” Stories serve the biological function of encouraging pro-social behavior. Across cultures, stories instruct a version of the following: If we are honest and play by the social rules, we reap the rewards of the protagonist; if we break the rules, we earn the punishment accorded to the bad guy. The theory is that this urge to produce and consume moralistic stories is hard-wired into us, and this helps bind society together. It’s a group-level adaptation. As such, stories are as important as genes. They’re not time wasters; they’re evolutionary innovations.

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parenting for authentic success

My friend Judith Warner has reviewed an important-sounding book in today's New York Times Book Review, on a topic forever close to my heart.  Titled Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success and authored by Madeline Levine, the book is about teens pushed toward false ideals of success, and the consequences. It's about the teens with whom Levine, a therapist, works—"depleted, angry, and sad as they compete for admission to a handful of big-name colleges" and about the parents "who can't steady or guide them, so lost are they in the pursuit of goals that have drained their lives of pleasure, contentment, and connection."  It's about a society that has, in Warner's words, "reached a tipping point, in which the long-dawning awareness that there's something not quite right about our parenting is strengthened into a real desire for change."

The review closes with this paragraph:

After all, as Levine notes, the inconvenient truth remains that not every child can be shaped and accelerated into Harvard material. But all kids can have their spirits broken, depression induced and anxiety stoked by too much stress, too little downtime and too much attention given to external factors that make them look good to an audience of appraising eyes but leave them feeling rotten inside. 

I read this review at this early hour and my mind returns to George William Shaw, whose funeral earlier this week was deeply moving.  Geordie, George's son, spoke eloquently.  Describing his father as an extraordinary ordinary man, Geordie went on to list George's greatest achievements:  He never put himself first.  He was a quiet provider.  He made all who knew him comfortable.  He made us laugh.  He loved his wife and let her know, every single day.  He bought his daughter roses every birthday.  He taught the neighborhood kids how to pitch.  He never missed a sporting or school event when his children, or their friends, were involved.  He treated his daughter-in-law like a daughter.  He was proud of his roots.

These achievements seemed to me to be of the very highest order.  These achievements, in the long run, mattered.  Vacationing neighbors chartered a plane back to my neighborhood to attend the funeral of this man. A former neighbor flew in from Steamboat Springs.  The friends of George's children came.  Every neighbor in these parts stopped whatever they had planned for Thursday and gathered in memory of George.  This was because of who George was and not because of George's resume.

George's life is proof of the power of goodness, plain and simple.  George's achievements are, perhaps, the kind that we parents can dedicate ourselves to teaching, the kind that Warner and Levine are suggesting we must.  The what will come for our teens.  The who is long and tender in the making.

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We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication/Judith Warner: Reflections

I wrote last evening of spending time in the company of people I admire—of clients who become and remain friends.  That post was prompted, in part, by the all-employee meeting conducted by Shire Pharmaceuticals—an event that took place beneath a wide, white tent on a morning that recalled summer far more than it augured fall.

Judith Warner—bestselling author of Perfect Madness, former New York Times blogger, once a special foreign correspondent for Newsweek—was among those who, as an invited guest, made that all-employee meeting so special.  Her newest book, We've Got Issues, released earlier this year, tells the story of Warner's journey as a journalist who had once assumed, like so many others have, that we are a nation dangerously prone to over-diagnosing and -medicating our children.  This was the state of things, a fact, a reality so transparent that she'd agreed to write an entire book about it.  She'd signed a contract called "UNTITLED on Affluent Parents and Neurotic Kids." She was set to collect her arsenal of facts in support of her theory that "the kids we saw making the rounds of doctors and therapies were no more than canaries in the coal mine, showing the first-line symptoms of the toxicology of our pathological age."  Her book would be on the shelves in but a few years' time.

Except.  Except sometimes writing is the only path toward knowing, and the harder Warner worked to prove her point, to sway her audience, the more quicksandish her proposal became.  In her quest to meet parents who proved her point about the desire for quick diagnoses and easy fixes, for drugs that could turn report-card Cs into stellar As or, perhaps, ease the overscheduled child into one more resume-building activity, she encountered instead the heartbreak of those who were watching their children struggle and who did not know where to turn. She found herself jolted by questions that didn't have easy, or obvious, answers.  She discovered a fact that began to haunt her:  "Five percent of kids in America take psychotropic drugs.  Five to 20 percent have psychiatric issues.  That, according to my math, just doesn't add up to a pattern of gross overmedication."

What do you do when the argument you seek to make (you promised to make) is porous?  What do you do when your own world view can't be supported by the facts?  If you are a writer with the integrity of Judith Warner, you stand back, reassess, look harder.  You write a book with a brand new title, and you chart new journalistic territory by writing passages such as these:

If we live in a time when the brains of non-ADHD kids are shutting down from mental overload, if we live in an era when even our young winners are "a bit less human," the it's fair to say that normal life is now "sick."  But that's using the word "sick" as a value judgment, not a medical category, and it's urgently important not to confound the two.  For to do so does a real injustice to children with mental health issues and their parents, and also makes improving empathy and getting better help for those children all but impossible.

The issues are tangled, and complex.  Psychotropic drugs can be abused; sometimes they are.  But by and large, Warner writes, it's time for all of us to bring more compassion to this issue, and less headline-borrowing judgment.  There is no love like a parent's for a child.  We are all, in our way, working toward rightness—hoping to be heard, hoping to be helped, hoping that education, therapy, and science (for it takes all three) can keep our children safe.

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Writing for tweens

I loved Judith Warner's most recent blog post, Seventies Something (http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/). I loved the questions it raised: "What power can any of us – moms and daughters, adrift in the cultural mainstream — have against the hugely seductive, hypnotic machine that has brought us Paris, Miley, Lindsay and more?" I loved its conclusion: "The only thing we can do is provide some sort of inspiration – of a kind of womanhood that makes them want to connect to the better aspects of the girlhood we once knew. And then, give them the space and the time to make it their own."

When UNDERCOVER, my novel for tweens, was released this past September, I wondered how it would fare in a gossip-glittered world. I still don't have any quantifiable answer to that, but what I do have is a growing collection of anecdotals—moments where I've been stopped by mothers, aunts, young readers themselves, and asked point blank: Is this a (to use one person's word) "whole" story? Is this a novel in which intelligence is celebrated? Is this a novel that gives young readers something more than Paris and Britney to think about, aspire to?

I have been surprised by the questions. I have listened. And while I am no sociologist and will never name an era, I can say, in response to a line in Judith Warner's blog that yes, perhaps, there are more of us out here than I might have previously thought. Readers and writers who want heroines to soar, to transcend because of how deeply they think, how brilliantly they see. Maybe smart and self-defining is the new cool. Here's hoping, anyway.

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