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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