The latest five-star review of my book”Everyone Has A Story” available on Amazon
In the phrase usually attributed to the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, while we must live our lives forwards, we can only truly understand them looking backwards. I suspect it’s equally true that we can only make the connections that improve that level of understanding of our own selves when we look at the lives lived by our contemporaries. We don’t necessarily have to use them to hold a mirror up to ourselves, but looking at the motivations and the choices of others, sometimes in similar situations, sometimes not, does help us interpret how our own lives have shaped up.
Thus it is with this marvellous collection of 33 personal profiles, all of whom share only the characteristic that they are friends of the author. As he says in his opening dedication, it is our friends that make us who we are; who give our lives not only fulfilment but also, often, something to aspire to, something which challenges us or something makes a demand on us.
Drawing its title from the life story of one of the people profiled – that of a hospital volunteer – ‘Everyone Has A Story’ offers a heartwarming collection which documents ordinary people struggling to make their lives extraordinary in some way. Perhaps not too many of them would acknowledge that, even in restrospect and certainly not at the time – but this is part of the beauty of the collection.
It’s not easy to capture the essence of what makes lives lived full such a joy to read about, and which makes them meaningful to people who may not necessarily know who they are or understand the contributions that have made, but the author has striven to deliver a volume which, in narrating the lives of others, helps us interpret our own. He does so without evidently interfering in how they tell their stories and what details they choose to include while, crucially, remaining entirely and openly non-judgmental about their choices.
In its relation of how some of the author’s friends have lived their lives, the collection raises the stock of human knowledge ultimately about how we can be good to one another; and, thereby, raises us all above the humdrum. We share the planet with each of us; and by giving each other that bit more space to tell the stories of how we became what we are, we can make them extraordinary, too.