The Moth – the hottest ticket in town if you like telling tales

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/10/the-moth-hottest-ticket-telling-tales

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The longest queue I've ever seen in New York was not the one outside a Trader Joe's the day before hurricane Sandy – all those people waiting to buy water and torch batteries before the power went out. Nor was it the cupcake pilgrims who regularly form a line that snakes blocks long from the door of the Sex and the City-endorsed Magnolia Bakery. The queue I walked for 15 solid minutes without reaching its end was one that formed a couple of years ago outside a downtown Manhattan venue for The Moth, a live storytelling event that was by that point already a phenomenon. Why is it, I wondered, that we'd wait in line for hours, just to see an assortment of "regular" people stand up and tell a story for five minutes?

Recently, I had a chance to understand why at a Moth GrandSlam event in Brooklyn. Here, winners of previous StorySlams competed for the title of GrandSlam champion under the night's theme of "game change". Between stories, the host read out audience responses to the invitation to "tell us about a time when you realised everything would be different from this moment on". This, in essence, is what every story told at a Moth event is built on.

For one storyteller, it was when he stepped into a Halloween parade, newly dumped and dressed as a lobotomy patient. For a teacher, it was shouting out a line from Monty Python in frustration and having it answered by one hitherto silent eight-year-old girl.

The Moth was founded by the novelist George Dawes Green, a southerner who wanted to recreate the kind of storytelling that happened on his friend Wanda's back porch on long summer nights. He began the series in New York in the late 90s, around the same time as the radio show This American Life began broadcasting from Chicago. They share a sensibility – the latter is characterised by life stories that seem parochial before revealing some quietly profound universal truth – and both have been particularly influential in ingraining a new confessional mode, one that's conversational, unpolished, humble and, above all, earnest. In its worst iterations, that mode makes self-deprecation its own form of self-aggrandisement; exaggerating your haplessness is an easy way to ingratiate.

Dawes Green seems cognisant of this when he quotes George Orwell: "A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."

True. And when those series of defeats are told honestly, the act of hearing them can add up to a kind of triumph. It's what the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnikcorrect, a long-time friend of the series, calls "the alchemy of all literature", the magic of "a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of I's" being turned, by an audience, into a series of "me"s.

More than 10,000 stories have been told at Moth events across the US and its podcast now averages more than 1 million downloads per month. Unsurprisingly, it's drawn an impressive array of writers – Malcolm Gladwell, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Ames, Christopher Hitchens and Annie Proulx have all told stories. So too have Molly Ringwald, Ethan Hawke and Suzanne Vega. The celebrity storytellers tend to be part of the Moth's "mainstage" programme but its open-mic StorySlam events, which take place in 15 cities across the US, are just as popular. There's a huge chance element to them: members of the public, many of whom will have been preparing a story for weeks, enter their names into a draw and hope to be picked.

Now the Moth's artistic director, Catherine Burns, has selected 50 of the series' best stories and made them into a book, The Moth (Serpent's Tail, £12.99). When it was published last year in the US, it became a New York Times bestseller. In the UK, the book will act as an advertisement of sorts for a series of events, including one in Edinburgh on 23 August and a night at Islington's Union Chapel five days later.

What makes The Moth extraordinary is that the stories are spoken live, without notes. Is it a little perverse to turn that into something recorded and written? It could have been but, wisely, the tales haven't been tweaked or primped into neater, more "written", prose. Instead, they remain very much in the voices of those who spoke them and thus retain the vulnerability and rawness inherent in the situation of one person, alone at the mic, telling a room full of strangers something personal.

Sometimes, there's an accidental charm to this spoken quality. In Angel, for example, Darryl McDaniels of hip-hop act Run DMC recounts being told that he's adopted: "Right then and there, the whole world stopped [makes sound of screeching brakes]." There's something lovely about that unaffected, spontaneous sound effect that was once enacted live, now living on in print as a stage direction. Meanwhile, in the case of The Past Wasn't Done With Me, I wondered whether the narrator cried as he talked of accidentally shooting his best friend in the face as a teenager.

Not all the stories, thankfully, are that heartbreaking. Andrew Solomon details a wildly unorthodox cure for depression in Senegal, Malcolm Gladwell recounts a hilariously misguided wedding song and AE Hotchner, a friend of Hemingway's, remembers the time he became a bullfighter for a day.

And then there's the collection's first story, the last paragraph of which made every hair on my arms stand up on end with a kind of joy. I don't want to spoil it for you, but Life on a Möbius Strip involves black hole theory, an improbable love story and one final twist of an ending so perfect that if it were fiction it would be rejected for being too neat.

One of the book's final stories is called Life Support and it's the best example of the way in which things spoken, rather than written, are somehow purer, more protected from mawkishness. Our narrator is a young black woman who drags herself out of depression and from her mother's garage to work as a home healthcare aide. But the couple she's assigned to are Ku Klux Klan members. The comic horror of it all comes to a pitch as the narrator address herself: "Dude, [...] you do not have time for a Rosa Parks moment. You have to get through with this. OK?"

So she gets on with it, ignoring the confederate flag above the dying man's bed and the white hood over the coat stand. When the man dies, his wife, who'd once greeted her "with hate pouring from her eyes", calls the agency to thank her and leave her a tip that the agency doesn't allow her to keep. The narrator realises that she has in fact received an enormous "tip". It's the non-monetary, priceless kind, specifically the knowledge that "we had come together, she and I, these two incredible desperate people [...] and our lives touched, and in that little touching we changed the trajectory of our lives just a little bit".

To buy The Moth for £10.39 with free UK p&p call 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk