I have a high propensity for trying to make awful situations better. It’s the Ephron-Defence. In the screenwriter’s approach to life something painful can be made less so through telling a story. Whimsy or wit, sentiment or structure, can be imposed on something messy and complicated. Nora Ephron sums it up this way; in the eighties novel Heartburn, loosely based on the breakdown of her marriage, she has her narrator explain:
"Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.
Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much.
Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it."
And this:
“She must be feeling better,” said Ellis. “She’s making jokes.”
“She makes jokes even when she’s feeling terrible,” said Vera. “Don’t let her fool you.”
“Why do you have to make everything into a joke?” asked Diana.
“I don’t have to make everything into a joke,” I said. “I have to make everything into a story. Remember?”
“How do you feel?” asked Eve.
“Hurt. Angry. Stupid. Miserable.” I thought for a minute. “And guilty.…It’s like a beautiful thing that suddenly turns out to be broken into hundreds of pieces, and even when you glue it back together it’s always going to have been horribly broken.”
I’ve thought about this a lot recently. I’m aware that I have a tendency to reconfigure the narrative in a more positive direction when writing Joe’s Daughter. It doesn’t mean there’s no grit, but it does mean that it won’t appear here as a subject (although it does appear here in The Independent and here on Good Therapy). Because it’s already there, always; it’s the reason this exists.
I know what it is to drop a parent off at a psychiatric ward two days before Christmas; of wondering this time when my mum says goodbye, whether it is for real and forever; of hanging up Skype with my dad, each week, guilty and upset because he is so, so tired and the only one still there; of driving a mother who is raving to a doctor’s appointment hopeful and expectant, and driving her home again afterwards frustrated and confused, with no plan and nothing changed; of loosing, slowly, by degrees, someone that I love, and being unable to recover her.
None of this is fine. None of it is ok. This isn’t what I want. But I do get to choose, not only how I define my relationship and my position to it, but also the story that I tell and the tone that it takes.
I know that I will always lean to the positive-side and I know that I will always try to fix something. So if I suggest a song or a movie trailer, a blog or a book, an artist or an article, that is designed to make you feel better, that might lighten the mood and amuse you, it's not because I don’t care or I don’t take it seriously. It’s because I do, and I do. I’d just rather we talk in that territory, that the vehicle for getting through is more beautiful, more hopeful, and more joyful, than the thing we’re trying to deal with.
In the domain of science, rather than rom-coms, the Wellness Consultant Taylor Ross has discussed this necessity of owning our own narrative. She posits that how we articulate the story of our lives, and how we narrate where we have come from and who were are, even if the content is bad, affects our stance on it. Which means in effect that creating stories can help us become more confident with our own material.
And if we’re still thinking in the realm of the Ephron-Defense, then we’re thinking too about happy endings; it’s a non sequitur:
“It has a happy ending, but that’s because I insist on happy endings; I would insist on happy beginnings, too, but that’s not necessary because all beginnings are intrinsically happy, in my opinion. What about middles, you may ask. Middles are a problem. Middles are perhaps the major problem in contemporary life.”
So it’s not just how we tell our stories, the middles of our lives, but how we end them too, that matters. This time we can look to Dr Christine Carter for the ‘science of happy endings'. In Raising Happiness, she explains that how we end something impacts our entire experience of something; if we end something on a positive note, we’ll evaluate that whole thing more positively (the other factor is how we felt at the moment that our emotions peaked in intensity): “How long an event lasts doesn’t affect how we remember it. So getting over negative emotions quickly is not as important as ending on a positive note”. In short, happy endings can “diminish the effects of the negative experience.” How we end, as well as how we tell, our stories has an impact.
And I know that I still believe, in spite of and not because of, in happy endings. Even if I don’t always get to choose what they are or when they happen, I can choose the story I tell you, as well as myself, those beginnings, middles and ends.