True life stories can literally be stranger and more extraordinary than fiction. And, as always, hindsight gives us perspective. As F.A. Hayek puts it: “Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.”
TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION
True life stories often cut to the bone and provide extraordinary facts about a person’s life and experiences. An excellent example is the book of Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer, which is now also featuring as a major TV series.
To make sense of her career as a profiler of serial killers, Pistorius took to the written word. Her harrowing journey from a normal person to one submerged by death and violence gives us compassion and empathy for the work done by detectives and police officers, and the emotional toll their work demands from them.
“Serial killers experience the power over life and death as omnipotence … When I interrogate a serial killer, I dive into the abyss of his soul,” she writes.
“From 1994 to 2000, when South Africa was a young democracy, the country was stalked by a succession of brutal serial killers. Psychologist Micki Pistorius became the first profiler for the South African Police Service, playing a vital role in identifying and interrogating these killers, as well as training detectives nationally and in other countries. She broke ground with her theory on the origin of serial killers and is considered a trailblazer in her field.
Catch Me a Killer details the cases she worked on – from the Station Strangler and the Phoenix Cane Killer to Boetie Boer and the Saloon Killer. The book also features legendary detectives such as Piet Byleveld and Suiker Britz, as well as the FBI’s Robert Ressler.”
WHY RECORD MY LIFE STORY?
Author Robin Storey provides us with multiple reasons why it is important to record your life:
1. Leave A Legacy For Your Family
2. Become A Part Of History
3. Understand Yourself Better
4. It Is Therapeutic To Write Your Life Story
5. Feel More Connected
6. It Gives You A Sense Of Purpose
7. It’s Good For Your Health
8. You’ll Make New Friends
9. It’s Fun And Exciting To Write Your Life Story
10. Discover Your Creativity
PSYCHOLOGISTS RECOGNISE THE VALUE OF LIFE STORIES
On a Ted Talks show Emily Esfahani Smith discusses the kinds of stories we tell about ourselves.
“Our identities and experiences are constantly shifting, and storytelling is how we make sense of it. By taking the disparate pieces of our lives and placing them together into a narrative, we create a unified whole that allows us to understand our lives as coherent — and coherence, psychologists say, is a key source of meaning.”
Psychologists today are investigating the stories of individual lives, stories of intimate relationships and family stories, says Dan McAdams.
“McAdams is an expert on a concept he calls “narrative identity.” McAdams describes narrative identity as an internalized story you create about yourself — your own personal myth. Like myths, our narrative identity contains heroes and villains that help us or hold us back, major events that determine the plot, challenges overcome and suffering we have endured. When we want people to understand us, we share our story or parts of it with them; when we want to know who another person is, we ask them to share part of their story.”
TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION IN LIFE STORIES
McAdams found that people who are driven to contribute to society and to future generations, are more likely to tell redemptive stories about their lives, or stories that transition from bad to good. Do you have a life story to share with your family, or the world? Contact me, as an author coach, to discuss options and possibilities.