Every Great Story Ends Where It Begins — But With a Twist
Okay, so there’s a great rule for how to end any story and the best way to understand is to first talk about a book I absolutely tore through last week. It’s called Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller. She’s the co-host of RadioLab and, akin to the show’s best segments, Miller’s book examines the strange intersection of memoir and scientific investigation.
A bit about the book:
The book is nominally a biography of David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford, and the lifelong obsession he had with finding new types of fish and then naming them. The great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 ruined two decades of Jordan’s work and the thousands of fish he had yet to classify, and Jordan responded to the tragedy by…
…very calmly starting again.
That stoic perseverance, that hope, fascinated Miller, a woman who had never had these traits, and she thought in Jordan’s story she might find the meaning for her own existence. The book pivots on these narratives: Jordan’s story and Miller interpretation of its message as she applies it to her life, and as each narrative strand turns darker and more complex, the book’s pages nearly turn themselves.
