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- [00:00]
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- [01:41]
Lloyd Lockridge
In today's episode, I'm going to have a conversation with a gentleman named Bruce Fieler. Bruce is a lot of things. He's written over 15 books, including some New York Times bestsellers. He's a public speaker who has given TED talks with millions of views. He has degrees from Yale and Cambridge, as well as multiple James Beard Awards for his writing at Gourmet Magazine. He has walked around 25,000 miles through the Middle east retracing the stories of the Bible, and he has a new book out called A Time to How Ritual Created the World and How It Can Save Us. But the reason I initially wanted to talk to Bruce is because back in 2013, he wrote a book called the Secrets of Happy Families. It's a fascinating book, and if you like this podcast, I think you'd enjoy reading it. Bruce explores a lot of different topics in the book, but he spends a decent amount of time Looking at the way family stories function in a family. Why do we tell family stories? What do they say about us? Which stories do we choose to tell? And what is the impact of a story on a family, adults and kids alike? In his writing, Bruce encounters and discovers some interesting answers to these questions. So I wanted to have him on to share some of that knowledge and wisdom with us. Bruce Filer, thank you for coming on the show.
- [02:55]
Bruce Feiler
Thank you, Lloyd. Thank you for inviting me.
- [02:57]
Lloyd Lockridge
You write about family, about ritual, about religion, you write about big life transitions and being a dad. You're drawn to these big questions about life and how to live it. But in your own words, how do you categorize your field of interest?
- [03:13]
Bruce Feiler
I grew up in a family that's very into the idea of family and we talk about it all the time. And I, in some ways would describe my childhood family as a sort of hyper functional family as opposed to a non functional family which turns out to have as many problems as the opposite. But I'll leave that off stage for right now. But I grew up as a kind of merger of two cultures. Five generations of Jews in the American south, right? And I love being Southern. I love the family ness and I love the stickiness and I love the storytellingness. But I always grew up apart from kind of mainstream Southerners, if you were. And I also grew up Jewish and I love being Jewish. I love the family ness and the stickiness and the storytellingness. But. But I grew up not only separate from the global Jewish experience, but also the American Jewish experience. So I felt a part of it and apart from it. And in a lot of ways, it is that sense of being in something and being outside of it that's always motivated my work. But to answer your question kind of directly, I think I have fundamentally two skills. Number one, I'm an experientialist. Like, I grew up in the age of discount airfare. Like when I want to learn something, I want to go there and immerse myself and so have the experience. So that's kind of one obsession of mine. I'm an experientialist and I'm also an explainaholic. Then I like coming out of where I've ever immersed myself and explaining to people what it is that I saw and that I experienced.
- [04:34]
Lloyd Lockridge
Well, let's talk about what you've experienced and explained in the writing of the Secrets of Happy Families. Your book opens with a quote from Leo Tolstoy, which he uses to open the novel Anna Karenina. Tolstoy writes all happy Families are alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. I love the choice here because with respect to Tolstoy, you're sort of looking at the neglected side of the quote. You are explicitly investigating the ways in which all happy families are alike. Before we get into the book and some of the ideas stemming from the book, I want to know what you mean by happy families. I know what you mean by family, but what do you mean by happy?
- [05:13]
Bruce Feiler
I sort of have this idea that happiness is this thing, right? Like, I'm old enough to remember Johnny Carson, right? Coming out of that, behind that curtain and going and standing as a star and like, oh, that's what happiness is. It is this thing and you go find it and you stand on it, and that's when you know you're going to be happy. But that's not what happiness is, and that's not what we know about happiness. Now a generation into the positive psychology movement.
- [05:47]
Lloyd Lockridge
Okay, for those who aren't familiar, tell us about the positive psychology movement and what we think we know about being happy.
- [05:54]
Bruce Feiler
So for the first century of psychology, the dominant way that the whole approach to life and human psychology was, was we're going to study people that are deviant, that are somehow broken, that are troubled. Whatever language you want to put in. It was Marty Seligman, when he took over the American Psychology association, gave this speech in the turn of the 21st century and said, we need to focus on what happy people have in common and see if we can help people to be more positive. Which was the birth of the phrase positive psychology. There was a problem in this approach. And the problem in this approach was that it was also just focused on individuals. And so when I began this project, basically in the first decade of the 21st century, what if we take that interest in how individuals can be happy and apply it to groups? Right.
- [06:44]
Lloyd Lockridge
So you take this approach to the individual and you apply it to the group. And the group that you choose is family. Tell me why family?
- [06:52]
Bruce Feiler
Just to kind of set the stage here. I was a parent of identical twin girls. Okay. And you're always playing defense, right? It's sippy cups and diaper caddies and nap time and food time and wake up time and bedtime. Like you're just. You're responding to what's coming toward you.
- [07:12]
Lloyd Lockridge
You're under siege.
- [07:13]
Bruce Feiler
Yeah, exactly. And you're under siege not only from your children, but for all the things you're supposed to do and not supposed to do. Right. I mean, there's this deluge of Rules and wisdom. And now it's social media, like kind of overburdening with you. Whatever. You're doing it right, you're doing it wrong. Try this, try that. Here's a hack, Here's a better way to do it. Human beings have something that basically almost no other species, with one or two exceptions has, which is as soon as the offspring stop weaning their children, the offspring can have children of their own. That doesn't happen with human beings. We have this like decade. I think of it as like between potty training and the prom, right? That's where we build the sense of family. That's where we learn to communicate. That's where we learn to tell stories about who we are and who we want to be.
- [07:58]
Lloyd Lockridge
So a minute ago you were talking about how your writing career started. You're essentially telling stories to your family. You're writing narratives in letter form and sending these letters back from Japan, which go kind of viral among your friends and family. On a pre digital level, in your work sense, you deal with narratives on at least two levels. One, you construct narratives in your work. And two, you talk about the power of narrative itself, the power it can have for a company, a military platoon, and more unexpectedly, a family. I say unexpectedly because I think the idea of story and like corporate culture is well understood at this point. Companies will even have a tab on their websites that say our story and the function of narrative in the military makes logical sense as well. Tales of heroism and sacrifice, I'm sure, has long been used to inspire soldiers and camaraderie. But the role a story plays in family feels like newer territory, at least in terms of our discussion around it. So let's get into this discussion around story and family. How does your investigation begin?
- [09:03]
Bruce Feiler
So what got me into this was actually family dinner. So in one way, nothing is more mythologized than family dinner. It's great. It holds the family together. It's food and camaraderie and sharing. And let's romanticize it. So I have two children. My wife runs an organization. At the time was probably in 20 countries. Today it's in 50 countries, helping entrepreneurs around the world. She's working at 6 o'. Clock. Like when our kids were young, we had to have them bathed and fed, you know, and in bed by seven if we had any hope of functioning or, you know, of surviving at 5am when they're waking up. And it turns out family dinner is great. But Americans rank 31 on a list of 35 countries that actually do it. For most of us, it doesn't work. Okay. So I set out to find out, what are we gonna do with this tension between the pressure. Okay, like the parenting culture puts on dinner, and the reality that for most people, you know, it's a hell zone in their lives. I called a woman named Laurie David, who was Larry David's first wife, who had written a book called Family Dinner, and I was like, started asking her a bunch of questions, and she's like, you don't want to talk to me. You want to talk to a guy named Marshall Duke. So I go to his house. He lives in Atlanta. And Marshall is like the grandfather we all want, right? He just retired after 50 years teaching psychology at Emory. And I go to his house for a Friday night dinner, and he basically tells me this story. And the story goes like this. His wife works with special needs children. Sometimes they're called differently abled, but the time, that's how we refer to them. And his wife Sarah, came to him and said, marshall, I notice the students I work with who know a lot about family history, seem to be able to handle the challenges and the upendings and the upsettings in their lives more effectively. So Marshall's a psychologist, and he and his colleague Robin Fievish, went and did a study. They came up with a test that I later in the New York Times deemed the do you know? Test, which is, do you know where your grandparents were born? Do you know an aunt or an uncle who had a difficulty? Do you know what happened around the time of your birth? And lo and behold, it turned out that the children who scored highest on this test, which is to say the children who know most about their family history, it was the number one predictor of their own emotional well being. They compared it to all these other tests, and it was the most clearly defined thing to understand how children function in the world. They did this study in the summer of 2001. As I don't have to tell you, 9, 11 came at the end of this national trauma. They went back and did it again. And sure enough, the children who knew more about their family history were better able to process the living history that we were all experiencing at the same time.
- [11:55]
Lloyd Lockridge
So obviously, knowing where your grandmother went to high school does not make you happier, more resilient, per se. So what is it about knowing this information that gives you the qualities these children had of being more resilient, adaptable, stable, whatever the terminology was?
- [12:11]
Bruce Feiler
So I basically asked him my version of exactly that question, like, what would explain this it doesn't, on the surface, make any sense. It's fascinating to know, but there must be a reason behind it. And what he told me is what brought you to this question, and to a certain extent, what brought you to me. And that is that families themselves have narratives. And he said, basically, there are three types of narratives. There's an ascending family narrative. We came from nothing, we worked hard, we have it all. That's an ascending family narrative. There's also a descending family narrative. We had a lot. There was a recession, a war, a natural disaster, and we lost it all. Or there's the third type, which he called an oscillating family narrative. Grandpa came from the far country, he worked hard. He became the vice president of a bank. His house burned down. His daughter was the first in the family to go to college. She got breast cancer. Families have this natural kind of oscillation. Now, obviously, a parent or a grandparent is not saying to a five year old, we have an oscillating family narrative. What they're doing is they're telling these stories in a sort of age appropriate way. And what they're communicating is people that, you know, have also had difficulty. You look up to them and they got through it. You can do the same thing. Now, I have talked about this, Lloyd. This appears in my book, the Secrets of Happy Families. It appears in a TED Talk that I gave about this. And the first question people always ask me in response, which you may be about to ask, so I'm a little bit cutting you off, is, what about adoptive children? At that dinner where I was, Marshall has three children. Two are natural born and one is adopted. There's anybody who knows the answer to this, and here's the thing about it. It's not passed down through the blood. It's passed down through the lifeblood, if you will, of the family. Because it's a way of. Of communicating and sharing. And the other thing people say is, oh, I do that. Oh, I'm really good at this. I tell my family stories. All I'm here to say, I'm sorry, I'm calling bunk on that, because the truth is, we have a different culture now. Don't trouble the children, right? Don't tell them your burdens. Keep your own difficulties to yourself, because they're supposed to focus on being a child. And as a result, you know how they say, like, if you use too much Purell when the baby is young, right. You're not gonna give them the immunity to disease. That's what we're doing. Now, by keeping these family secrets ourselves and not telling our children, you are communicating to them that these secrets, your difficulties, your challenges, your moments when the oscillation is at the bottom of the sine curve, you're saying to them that's too difficult to handle in an age appropriate way. Bring the skeletons out of the closet and learn to talk about your own challenges with your own children because you will then empower them to be able to handle their challenges better.
- [15:06]
Lloyd Lockridge
So after learning this information, did you put it to use in your own family or did you find that you were already doing it?
- [15:13]
Bruce Feiler
Yeah, I was probably one of those people that was deluding myself that I was doing it. I would say that I'll take it half a step back. So the first thing I did was change my approach to family dinner. Okay, so it turns out nothing is more studied than family dinner. Every you know and like has been taped and analyzed within an inch of its life. And the number one finding from this is there's only 10 minutes of real conversation in every dinner. The rest is taken up with Take your elbows off the table and pass the ketchup. If you can do that at dinner, great. Do it at dinner. Good for you. Give yourself a gold star. Pat yourself on the back. Okay? The family dinner police will be very happy with you. You will not be arrested. But for the half of us who don't, take that 10 minutes and put it elsewhere. Have a snack before bedtime. Do family breakfast. Right? Do it when the kids come home from sporting practice or ballet dancing, as it was in the case of my family. That's what matters.
- [16:10]
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- [16:56]
it is not hard to destroy a college Last season, the podcast Campus Files brought you stories of fraternity drug rings, stolen body parts, campus cults, and more.
- [17:06]
Bruce Feiler
And now Campus Files is back for another season.
- [17:09]
Lloyd Lockridge
There's a guy screaming into his phone. He's like, I just saw Charlie Kirk get assassinated right in front of me.
- [17:15]
Bruce Feiler
Every week is a new episode and a new story.
- [17:17]
Lloyd Lockridge
It was so chaotic, it's almost like
- [17:19]
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- [17:27]
Lloyd Lockridge
Congrats.
- [17:28]
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- [18:03]
Lloyd Lockridge
Okay, so, Bruce, I'm wondering if you could take us through the next step of your journey to understand the secrets of happy families. You've told us that family dinner is a somewhat mythologized ritual and that what's really important is the valuable time that doesn't have to be at family dinner. You know, it's probably not that hard to find 10 minutes in a day with your kids, but the question is, how do you take that time and make it valuable time? Like, what's one example of something that you can do with that time?
- [18:30]
Bruce Feiler
Have your kids tell you stories about their day that will help imprint the idea of storytelling so that as they get older, you know. And by the way, one of the things that I love about the whole storytelling thing that you're doing and families is there's another thing in the research at family dinner that seems incredibly relevant here, which is the thing that happens at family dinner that doesn't happen elsewhere. Or this 10 minutes, whenever it is, is what they call co narration, because you and I are siblings, Lloyd, and we were playing around wrestling in the backyard, and then there's a snake. And then you start telling the story about the snake. And I'm like, that's not what happened. This is what happened. You're like, no, that's not what happened. And that actually has a name called co narration, which is in and of itself a great skill to have to learn how to tell a story together. Deal with the differences, deal with the conflicts, deal with the idea that there are different perspectives. Is that all that different from what Faulkner was doing? He just was doing it himself. But it shows that there are different points of view to all of these stories. That's what they were like in your family, right? They were a little like sound and
- [19:32]
Lloyd Lockridge
Fury, more like Beavis and Butthead. You know, it's funny, one of the things I like about your work is that there's always more to the story than the initial claim. It's not just supporting one idea with a bunch of different examples. It's continuously turning and moving and developing, discovering. So Marshall Duke says kids who know more about their families are more resilient. So tell your kids more stories about your family. Right? Not entirely. What you're saying is you also need to get your kids to tell stories about their lives.
- [20:03]
Bruce Feiler
So if there's one thing you take away from this conversation other than tell family stories, is it's that make sure your children do most of the talking when you're around them and you do more of the listening. And what that's doing is that's harmonizing and balancing the sound. Because the biggest change in the culture right now, I could try to make the argument, and I believe this, is that everyone has a microphone now. And we've gone from a single microphone world to a multi microphone world where everybody is talking at the same time. And what they're doing is they're leaving the family where there might be people who disagree, and they're gravitating to social media around people who mostly agree with them. So the art of balancing, the art of disagreeing, and in effect, the art of co narration is exactly what we're missing. And a lot of it is that the ritual is what brings people together and compels them to learn to cooperate and navigate through conflict. And that's why the ritual is so effective. Whether the ritual is family dinner, or the ritual is a wedding, or the ritual is a funeral, or the ritual is a summer backyard barbecue, these are collective activities where we practice collectivity. And that's exactly what we're not doing today.
- [21:13]
Lloyd Lockridge
Right? And if I understand you correctly, the reason we're not doing that is because there are these things in your pocket, in your hand, these portals to other conversations where people who already agree on everything can engage in a kind of simultaneous monologue.
- [21:26]
Bruce Feiler
That's certainly a very big reason that it's happening. And it's not only that. When we go through those portals to other places, there are people who agree with us. Because of the anonymity that comes from being online, you conduct yourself essentially in a very, very, very antisocial way in many situations. There's something about being together, eating the food, being in the backyard, taking the walk, being on the boat, you know, watching the movie night, playing the Scrabble that doesn't allow you to escape, because elsewhere, you can just narrate. You can just be on speaker, Whereas when you're sitting in a family, you also have to be on input, and you also have to be listening. And that forces you to challenge your own expectations and ultimately to modulate them if you want the family to succeed.
- [22:16]
Lloyd Lockridge
Yeah, it's interesting. It seems to me you're adding another layer to a familiar idea, the idea of being in the present. These tools that we have on us all the time, these phones are just distraction machines. They are so distracting to us. And we can get out of anything, whether it's a line for a hot dog or a taxi ride to the airport, anything. We can go somewhere else and not have to exist in the present moment. The idea of being in the present at this point is a cliche. It's a virtue that people understand. Whether or not they practice it as another idea, but people understand it's probably important. But what you're saying is that, yes, it's important to be in the present, but there's extra weight. There's added importance to being in the present with your family.
- [23:00]
Bruce Feiler
So this brings up a very interesting question, which gets back to the first thing you raised in our conversation, which is, what is the definition of happiness? And I'm a little. I wrote a book called Secrets of Happy Families, and I exist in this world to a lot of extent. I'm grumpy about the word happiness. And the reason I'm grumpy is that we now know that happiness is something that you experience in the present. Okay? It's a feeling. It's an emotion. And animals can feel happy in the present. But one of the things that distinguishes animals from human beings is that we have the ability to stitch together past, present, and future. What stitches together past, present, and future? A story stitches together past, present, and future. We have the ability to create stories, and we are, let's just say, 100 years in. I mean, Aristotle did it 2,500 years ago, but we're 100 years into modern social science saying, what is a story? What is lore? What is a family story? And the answer is, scholars almost don't agree about this at all. But here's what they do agree on. A story is two things connected over time. Okay, So a snowball is not a story. A bloody nose is not a story. So what's the connection between the snowball and the bloody nose? Now that's a story. I'm gonna tell you a story right now. I get up in the morning. It snowed overnight. I go downstairs, I put on my coat, I open the door. What is going through your mind? What am I seeing when I open the door?
- [24:38]
Lloyd Lockridge
Like snow drift on the top of the cars.
- [24:40]
Bruce Feiler
I'm now gonna continue my story. It snowed overnight. It was cold. It was a big storm. I wake up, I go downstairs, I have a cup of coffee. I eat my breakfast. I put on my coat, and I open the door. What do I see? A giant pile of donuts. So now what's happening? I have upended the story. Okay, I have a plot twist. And you know what happens? You're paying more close attention than you were before. Because one of the reasons that we all say now we're wired for stories. I remember being in Marshall's house at that dinner, and he had a copy of the Storytelling Animal. We were talking about how we're wired for stories. You're so wired for it. When I'm telling you my story, you're trying to answer it. You're finishing the story, and you're sort of falling asleep. And then when I say a pile of donuts, you're like, now I'm paying attention. So now I'm going back to the story. It snows overnight, been a big storm. I go downstairs, I have a cup of coffee, I have my breakfast. I put on my jacket, open the door, what do I see? A giant pile of donuts. Now what am I going to do? Am I going to go back inside and say, I'm not leaving. Am I going to start to eat the donuts? Am I going to start to give away the donuts? Okay, this is what an oscillation is. We get piles of donuts every single day. That pile of donuts could be something small, like a fender bender. It could be something like a storm that hit where? I'm here in New York City that shut subways down yesterday. It could be a natural disaster. It could be a global pandemic. Life is about piles of donuts and how we react to them. And there comes a moment where you're stuck and you don't know what to do, and you don't know how to react, and you don't know what's going to happen next. And in that moment, you can't tell the story, but you know you've gotten through it. You know you're on the other side. And to bring this back to where we started, when you start to make meaning from it, because the story itself does not have meaning, you have to give it the meaning. And it is that act of giving meaning that is the act of being alive. That's why meaning is more important than happiness, because it's about how we react not only when we're happy, but also when we're unhappy.
- [26:49]
Lloyd Lockridge
Back to Marshall Duke's study and the impact that family stories have on successive generations. The family story tells the descendant. People I'm related to have dealt with piles of donuts before I can do this. Is that basically what the stories are giving children confidence?
- [27:07]
Bruce Feiler
So now you get a story from me. The Secrets of Happy Families was published in the spring and when I published that book, that's what I thought. Six months later, my father, then in his late 70s, who had Parkinson's for some period of years at that time, got very depressed. This was a man who had never been depressed a minute in his life. He got very depressed from Parkinson's and he tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. I mentioned before that I come from a very hyper functional family. My brother was focusing on the family business, my sister was focusing on the medical. I'm a storytelling guy. What was I going to do? I had been immersed. I spent decades of my life writing stories about the oldest stories ever told. I had just published this book called the Secrets of Happy Families. And I thought, you know what, maybe my dad has a narrative problem. Maybe he's lost the plot of his own life story. So one Monday morning I sat down, I sent my dad an email. Tell me about the toys you played with as a child. Now people think I'm a writer. My dad had never written anything longer than a memo and probably like an eight word memo in his life. But he answered that story. So I sent him another one. You know, tell me about the house you grew up in. This process continued for the next eight years until my father, weeks before he died, completed a 65,000 word memoir. One question, one story at a time. As it happens, on the day that I am recording this conversation with you, I just received a proof of that book which we are going to share in a gathering of his friends and in his honor next week in Savannah, Georgia. There is not a person in my family that does not believe that that process of storytelling saved my father's life. And the reason I've told this story is because what you asked me was, is the purpose is the lesson is the gift of the family story, that the children understand that when they have difficult times that they can turn their life into a story. The answer is yes, that is a gift. But it is not the gift, because the gift is also for the parents and the grandparents. You have secrets that you have not told. And the process of processing those secrets, the process of reliving those experiences and the process of turning them into stories. Not just stories that you tell the children and grandchildren, but often stories that you tell yourself that helps you make meaning of your life. You become the creator, the teller, the writer of your own life story. And then that life story and all the life stories of the members of the family co narrate, coexist, co merge into what becomes the family story.
- [30:09]
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- [30:56]
Lloyd Lockridge
So, Bruce, we've been kind of circling around this idea. You've written about this. But one of the big lessons I'm getting from what you're saying is that it's as if we've been aiming at the wrong target. We've been aiming at this happiness target when we should be aiming at the meaning target. And happiness, whatever that is, will be a byproduct of hitting the meaning target. Is that fair to say?
- [31:21]
Bruce Feiler
I think that that's beautifully said, and I think it relates to what you're doing, Lloyd, because you're going to people and say, tell me a story, and let's use that story as a portal to understand you, your family, and a certain sub world of American life. What we're fundamentally talking about here is the elements of a story. Okay, so we've agreed that there's at least two elements, and they're connected over time. And part of the purpose of the story is to connect the snowball with the bloody nose. But there's something else that's being connected. Here, the teller and the listener are being created. After this experience with my father, when I found that the storytelling helped him reclaim the plot of his life, which is also what happened to me in my life, that I had a story that I could tell you. From that first book I wrote about Japan to the books I wrote about the greatest stories ever told in the Hebrew Bible, I had what I think of as a linear life. I figured out what I wanted to do early. I did it for no money. I had some success. I got married and had children. And then my story blew up in my 40s. First, I got cancer as a new parent of identical twin daughters. I had financial problems because my family owned a bunch of real estate that got wiped out in the Great Recession. And then my dad went on this suicide spree, as I have called it. And I lost the plot of my own story, and I couldn't talk about it. I was, like, ashamed. I was confused. I was embarrassed. I was sad. But when I did, it turned out that everybody has their own story of when their own life story got disrupted. And so I went out and I created this thing called the Life Story Project, where I, in the intervening seven years, have collected and analyzed 500 life stories of Americans from all ages and all walks of life and all backgrounds. And I've written now basically three books on this. The Life is In, the transitions grew out of that, the search about work, and a new book called A Time to Gather about the role that rituals play in our lives. And so I have had 500 conversations where I looked people in the eye and asked them to tell me the story of the most difficult things that they experienced. And what I found is that in every conversation, there was a moment where the storyteller was telling a story, then me, the listener, said something in response, and we together created something new. And by the way, that's exactly what just happened between you and me. I was saying something, and you said, oh, what I'm hearing is this. And that took us to a new place. That's what happens when the story gets told. There's a connection not just between the snowball and the bloody nose, but between the storyteller and the listener and between the past and the present. You're taking a story from the past where it appears to belong, and you're telling it in the present. And this teller and the listener are together creating some new connection. What is the name of that connection? That's the meaning.
- [34:19]
Lloyd Lockridge
And I guess therein lies the challenge that we've Been talking a little bit about in this conversation, making time to make connections. If happiness is a byproduct of meaning or purpose, and meaning is made through connections, then that's where it all begins. And I suppose that's a big part of what's missing in our lives and in a world that is increasingly fast paced and distracting and withdrawn, frankly.
- [34:45]
Bruce Feiler
So I saw a study recently, I don't know if you've seen this, is that we walk 15% faster than people walked on the street 20 years ago. And as a result, there are fewer encounters with other people and there are fewer moments of connection. Because if you look at all of the challenges that we faced collectively, loneliness, isolation, that's an absence of connection. Polarization. Right. That's an absence of peacemaking and connection. Okay? Decivilization, dehumanization, AI. These are all about the absence of connection. And you say accurately that we are craving story because fundamentally, we're craving connection, because fundamentally we're craving belonging, because fundamentally, we're craving humanity.
- [35:33]
Lloyd Lockridge
You write about in your book the family Narrative. I think that people understand family stories, of course, but family narrative seems like a slightly more developed idea. How do family stories form a family narrative? Does work need to be done to do that, or is that something that happens organically?
- [35:48]
Bruce Feiler
Yeah. I love this question, and I don't fully know the answer to, but it's part of a new idea that I'm trying to flesh out in my own mind and try to piece together. And I guess maybe the simplest way that I can say it is to use a word that we don't use a lot, and that doesn't have necessarily always a great connotation, but the word is inheritance, that we inherit many different things from our families. We inherit biology. Right. We inherit the house or the car or whatever it might be, but we also inherit a story. Okay. And that story has to do with movement, it has to do with beliefs, it has to do with origins. Yeah. Oh, the tomato sauce that grandma made. Right. Or the trip that the aunt and uncle made across the plains to settle in this place. And then we all went and follow. Right. Or, oh, yeah. Oh, that person who was the war hero and that person we don't talk about who did that thing that we want to forget. Right. And this goes back again to the oldest stories. Right. This idea is in the opening verses of the book of Genesis. Right. What is that story? It's a story of generations, Right. It's a story of the patriarchs and the matriarchs. Right. What is any religion is a story of some hero figure who left the civilized world and went into the wilderness and had a transforming experience and came back and wrote it down. So we have the memories that may live before us in oral stories or in objects or in land or in appearances or in things that are up in the attic. But we also have a deeper historical inheritance of a narrative of who we are and what made us and how we became this way from people that we may almost assuredly have never met and whose objects we cannot touch and whose stories we never heard. And so I think it's important to remember that in the same way we passed down intergenerational resilience, if you will, we also pass down intergenerational trauma. And both of those are passed down not only biologically and not only in the hormones and cortisone levels and whatever that we now know. Intergenerational trauma is passed through, but also through narrative. So if you were living in a family that is spreading gratitude, good for you. Keep on spreading. But if you were spreading with resentment or bitterness or regret or hostility, recognize that you're passing that on to your children and grandchildren. And what are they going to do? They're going to act it out. Tell the story. If there's a motto here, tell the story. Don't be afraid of the stories that don't sound good on first telling. You can make pigs fly, as Steinbeck said, you can create the happy ending. You can create a better ending, even of a story that's not happy. That's the power of the story. And in this case with family stories, the power of a story you tell together.
- [38:42]
Lloyd Lockridge
Bruce Filer, thank you for joining Family Lore. Thank you for assembling this toolkit for families all over the world. It's been a pleasure.
- [38:51]
Bruce Feiler
Thank you for what you're doing, Lloyd. We're all listening.
- [39:02]
Lloyd Lockridge
If you have stories you'd like to share about your family, please email me@familylorepodmail.com that's familylorepodmail.com family lore is an Odyssey original podcast. It is written and narrated by me, Lloyd Lockridge. Our executive producers are Leah Rees, Dennis and I. Our lead producer and sound editor is Zach Clark. Our story editor is Katie Mingle. Additional sound, editing, mixing and mastering by Chris Basel and production support by Sean Cherry. Special thanks to Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Hilary Schuff, and Laura Berman. Thanks again for listening to Family Lore. And if you have time, we'd love for you to rate and review the show.
- [39:52]
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Bruce Feiler
foot in a mall and still looks amazing.
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