Diaries Finds Harrowing Tales in the Mundane
By Cat Richert

“Hi. It’s a couple days after my birthday, so I’m 20. It just sort of all hit me today. I was lying on the couch in the living room, and the sun was setting, and I just, I just knew it. It was at that moment that I really felt that I wouldn’t be alive at New Year’s. The last few weeks, I definitely felt that I was starting the dying process, and it’s just a matter of when. How fast. How much at a time… ”
This is the voice of Laura Rothenberg, a college student battling with cystic fibrosis, a lung disease that often takes its victims before the age of 30. Her story is far from ordinary, and Joe Richman (OC ’87) knew that. As part of Richman’s Radio Diaries series, Laura’s story, titled “My So-Called Lungs” was aired this past August on National Public Radio. Since 1996, Richman has been handing the microphone over to the least likely suspects – the elderly, the incarcerated, the young and the obscure – letting these seemingly ordinary people, like Laura, tell their remarkable stories.
The process is fairly simple: Richman and his colleagues train the
diarists to tape-record their daily life for three weeks, three months or even several years. What results is an audible journal displaying the diarist’s musings, conversations and most personal thoughts. Because the subjects are allowed to record when they want to without the pressure of a reporter, Richman feels that a more accurate portrait of the subject is depicted. The information collected on these tapes is often so personal, that Richman says he “could never even try to think of those questions and know that the answers would even exist. You’re constantly getting these surprises.”
Richman finds radio an excellent medium for people to tell their stories.
“The ironic thing is that radio is an incredibly visual medium. Before I do any interview, one of the first things I do is I get people to give me a tour of something,” he said.
He added that as the listener follows the diarist’s description, he or she is creating their own mental image.
“[The Diaries] enlist the help of the listener; you’re implicating them, but not too much.”
Although the amount of information recorded is immense, the best parts are compiled into a 30-minute segment to be aired on NPR’s All Things Considered.
“It’s like mining for gold,” Richman said. “For all the junk there is [on the tapes] once in a while there are these incredible moments.”
Richman had to do quite a bit of “tape mining” with his first radio diary. During production of his Teenage Diaries series, Richman encountered Josh Cutler. As an otherwise normal sixteen-year-old living with Tourette’s Syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary ticks and outbursts, Richman thought Josh would be an excellent candidate for the show.

“During the first three months of recording, I thought it was not going to work out,” Richman said. “Josh is a very guarded person and for him to do the diary, he was going to have to open up and really talk about his experience. . . he couldn’t quite do it.”
Hours of Josh’s recordings were dedicated to prank calls, watching wrestling on TV, everything but the heart of Josh’s story. As Josh became more comfortable with his journal, he began to open up. The final product was a gem.
One particularly poignant moment occurs when Josh is talking about his relationship with girls. “Girls are a very touchy topic with me, not physically—I wish,” said Josh. “I am an attractive person: I’m cute, I’m smart, I have a nice body, but a lot of the Tourettic things I do seem to drive other people, including girls, away.” Josh’s comments speak to the remarkable amount of bravery that these diarists must conjure into order to broadcast their private thoughts.
What results from this degree of intimacy is not always pretty. Indeed, stories like Laura’s and Josh’s are often sad, brutal and uncomfortable. Another of Richman’s series called The Prison Diaries has proven to be especially alienating to its listeners. In this series, Richman has inmates record their experiences with crime, violence and imprisonment. One segment is told by fifteen-year-old Cristel, a girl who slashed a schoolmate’s face multiple times with a razorblade. However, Cristel’s story is not just about her crime; she also talks about her mother, her upbringing and becoming a teenage mother. Richman noted that, for many listeners, they could not absorb these aspects of Cristel’s story.

“Once you hear the story of her crime, there’s no going back for many of the listeners,” Richman said.
But it is just this intimacy that makes The Radio Diaries so poignant. These are the stories of lives that we would never hear — might never want to hear — without Richman’s program. They challenge, enlighten and inspire by highlighting the strength of the human spirit.
“Most people hear these stories on All Things Considered as they are driving home from work. It’s like driving Cristel home and she is telling you her story from the passenger’s seat,” Richman said. “Hopefully, you’re seeing the world from Cristel’s perspective as if you knew her personally.”



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