Reality theater: Its joys and sorrows

I didn’t know what I was doing. Absolutely without a clue. I didn’t have much time to think about consequences, either; I was just grindin’ ’em out as fast as I could. Anything could be a column. See this rock here? Column potential. See this dead spider? Maybe something about killing spiders and the various fears and reservations around that simple act.

Why is a spider’s life not important? Are we all just unruly carnivores only a half step away from the savanna? Why are spiders so deeply creepy in a way, say, that bees are not? I could get 800 words out of that, easy.

So I looked around for stuff. Eventually I began plagiarizing my own life. Fiction writers do that a lot; they romanticize their childhoods or penalize their stepmothers or make themselves the heroes of alternate narratives. And they change all the names and move the story to Boston, so no one can prove a thing.

Writers are monsters. They feed off other people’s experiences, other people’s emotions. All the time they are sitting there pretending to be entirely in the moment, laughing or crying or going “oops,” and actually they are taking notes, arranging impressions, maybe even writing sentences. They are with you, except in the sense that they are somewhere else.

So, deadline pressure. I had to use what I had, so I had to tell stories that were more true than not. With things changed, because everybody has secrets.

I just started doing it, the way you might tell a funny family story after dinner. And then I started regularly doing it, not because I thought our family was any funnier or more poignant than other families, but because I could get a workable beginning, middle and end. And once every decade or so, the column turned confessional, because I thought my experience might be useful to others — and, as it turned out, it was.

So what I didn’t anticipate (because I wasn’t paying attention) is that people would be interested in the humans behind the anecdotes. They would store up data, and they would ask me what I thought of as personal questions, until I realized that I had entirely brought it upon myself.

Members of my family did not object. I gather whatever recognition they gained was entirely positive. My wife liked being portrayed as a courageous, adventurous person, even though she will furiously deny that she is courageous. My daughters seemed content, as well, although each asked me separately to keep this or that family story private. Plus, I gave them all the good lines. But it did occur to me to wonder about this explosion in personal narrative. I can’t think of a time in cultural history when people have been so open about telling their stories. Every sort of tale of forbidden behavior, every imaginable story about dying or not dying from various diseases, every narrative of rehabilitation through drugs or therapy or meetings or nothing at all — they’re all there, and they sell.

So here’s my theory: We used to be a multigenerational culture, with large families pretty much the norm. The families stuck together, at first because they had to for economic reasons, later because they wanted to.

But isolation is becoming the norm in American society. Teenagers are marketed to as a separate culture, and everyone has agreed to believe that. Old people are shunted into retirement villages (if they’re lucky) or nursing homes or lonely apartments in sketchy neighborhoods. And the young pair off and nest and breed, and maybe they see their extended family on Thanksgiving or maybe not. In the family culture, there was always someone to talk to. A failed romance? Ask Aunt Sophie how she coped when that bastard Ira moved to Connecticut. A little drinking problem? Uncle Tony had one of those, and so did Pop-Pop’s wife, Clara. Pain in the genital area? Billy is a doctor; he’ll see you for free.

But now we’ve lost that, which means we’ve lost the narratives that imparted homely wisdom buried in baroque tales. But we still want families; we still want to know how others are doing, or how they did it. So “This American Life” has a story about getting arrested. David Carr writes a memoir about addiction, getting sober and getting unsober and doing it again. There are any number of books about surviving breast cancer — and podcasts and websites and YouTube videos.

The global village gets succor from those tales. It’s the way we connect now, waving at each other from our mediated redoubts. And Tracy and Rachel and Shana and Alice and Satie and Bucket and Pancho all fit in there somewhere, semipublic humans leading what Terry Gross called “specimen lives.” It’s over; no damage done. Whew.

We all need someone to hear these stories. I promise they will be almost true.

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance? Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.