The burden of untold stories

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou once said "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

I touched on this topic a couple of weeks ago ("How can stories be bad?" Oct. 4). When you have story, you must tell it to someone. It's like scratching an itch. Sometimes anyone will do. My father used to love to tell his stories. Within a couple minutes of meeting a total stranger he would be off and running with his stories, and he would continue telling them as long as the stranger was willing to listen.

I tried to satisfy my own compulsion to tell my stories by writing my memoirs during Covid, when there wasn't much else to do.

Novelists and short story writers who, in addition to having all those personal stories that all of the rest of us have inside us, have fictional stories bursting to get out. To some extent, they write stories because they must. Stories come to them, and so they write them down and share them with anyone willing to pay money for them. Unlike the rest of us, they get paid for their compulsion.

Angelou uses the word bearing in regard to untold stories, suggesting that an untold story is a burden. One relieves the burden by telling the story. That works for most of us, but not for my father. He needed to tell the same stories over and over again, sometimes to the same audience.