Translator: Laura Cardonnet Reviewer: Darina Stoyanova
Can you imagine a world without stories?
I can. It's kind of boring.
You sit around at dinner parties.
(sound problem)
You share your day planner.
It's not the kind of world I wanna live in.
Stories and I go way back.
When I was a little girl, when I learned to read,
I'd be so excited when mom and dad went to bed at night.
I'd wait to hear their door close,
and I'd flip my bedside table lamp back on so I could jump right back into my book.
My mom, like every mother, had an innate sixth sense.
She knew something was up,
so she would sneak, as quietly as she could,
back to the bottom of the stairs to catch me.
And, I'd devised this, dare I say it, ingenious ploy, to hide.
What I'd do is I'd take the bedside lamp into bed with me.
And then I would pull the comforter over me and the lamp
and I'd read in this little like tent space
so that the light wouldn't get out from under the door.
(Laughter)
When mom caught me, and catch me she did,
she was not amused.
'Kathleen Sarah-Jane Murray!'
You know, she never called me that, but I could see it in her eyes.
(Laughter)
She promptly informs me that I had almost burnt the whole highstand,
along with my mom, and my dad, the poodle, my teddy bear collection,
and my little baby brother Jonathan.
(Laughter)
So, fully repentant, on the next day I went into the garage.
I stole my dad's flashlight.
I put it between the box spring and the mattress,
and I resumed reading everything I could get my hands on.
(Laughter)
I remember the first book that really marked me as a child.
I know what you're thinking but it wasn't Cinderella.
I love that story.
And it wasn't Nancy Drew.
I was 7,
and it was a little paperback volume I took from my dad's bookshelf.
It had cartoon animals on the cover.
It was George Orwell's "Animal Farm".
(Laughter)
My parents were puzzled by this choice, but they let me read it.
When I was done, my dad asked me, 'What did you think?'
And I told him, 'The pigs are not very nice people.'
(Laughter)
I mean, everything gets off to a great start on the farm.
They get rid of the oppressive farmer, the animals are free,
they put the Bill of Rights on the wall.
Then, the pigs get greedy and power-hungry so they sneak in at night
and where they had things written like, 'All animals are created equal'
they add things,
like, 'But some animals are created more equal than others'. Ugh!
(Laughter)
Still to this day, decades later, I stand by my initial assessment,
as a 7-year-old.
The pigs are not very nice people.
(Laughter)
But you know what, there is something exceeding me profound
in that statement of my 7-year-old self.
It's something so basic and fundamental about stories,
and so obvious that we don't say it enough.
Stories are about people.
Whether we're immersed in a story about a clownfish,
or a lasagna-obsessed cat, or maybe a little creature
with large hairy feet that finds a ring of power.
(Laughter)
Stories are there to challenge us.
You and me.
To think about the way we live our lives and the choices we make,
especially when confronted with hard decisions.
And that's one of the reasons stories are so special.
It's why we carry them with us throughout our whole life.
That's related also to this amazing thing that happens in your brains
when you're participating in a story.
You see when you fall in love with a character,
your brain releases oxytocin,
the bombing chemical that creates empathy or love.
And when you wrestle with that character
through the hardest moments of trials and tribulations,
you get stressed out, too.
Your brain produces cortisone, the stress hormone.
And the world of the story is so new and so exciting
that you get completely addicted to it.
As I did, as a child.
That newness creates and releases dopamine
and that series the experience within your memory forever.
So, there you have it: oxytocin, cortisol, dopamine.
The OCD, an extainly great story-telling.
(Laughter)
Why does all of this matter?
Well, you know, it matters because we know now
that there's not such thing as just a story for entertainment value.
Stories are rife with values.
They communicate world views.
They teach us how to act
and how to respond to situations that mirror and imitate life.
They invite us into a journey
and that journey affects everything we look at
when we stop reading a book or walk away from the theater
or turn the TV off.
They stay with us and they influence choices in our real lives.
For me, the best kinds of stories
mark a clear difference between right and wrong.
I mean, let's think about it.
Remember the end of the first Star Wars trilogy?
Ugh, ugh, ugh...
Nobody is rooting for the Emperor.
Everybody, deep down inside,
wants Luke's father to help him and save him.
And nobody walks away from Shakespeare's Macbeth thinking,
'I want to be just like Macbeth.'
(Laughter)
That's sort of like watching Breaking Bad
and deciding you want to be just like Walter White,
make all the same decisions as him, and devote your life to cooking crystal.
(Laughter)
That's not the point of the story, right?
Stories are an extraordinary form of collaboration,
across time and space.
We pass them down from generation to generation.
They change the way we look at our lives.
They change the way we look at ourselves.
And they change how we live.
Stories are the ethical markers of our time.
It's when we muddy that line between right and wrong
when we start rewarding injustice,
or we use the story just to sell us something we don't even need.
Or to buy into an ideology we don't even understand.
Then we ain't living that much differently than those animals on the farm.
Confused, distracted, disconnected from everything that really matters.
Throughout history, stories have been used for great good and great evil.
But I promise you one thing.
They will never be neutral.
(Applause)
Thank you.