What's in the Works

Just Above Bone

Everybody has written a memoir. 

This one takes a different approach:

It focuses on the power of story--not history--STORY.

Because how a family tells their story makes all the difference.

The Concept:

In Just Above Bone, I take a close look at the various ways families shape who they think they are by the way they tell their stories. I begin with my family’s love stories. I always assumed I was luckier than most because my family tells great love stories. Then one day, I realized the hazard: Listen long enough and you could wait a lifetime expecting to be swept off your feet.

What happens when our lives don’t turn out like the stories we’ve heard? Where to we turn when our long-claimed legacy is too much, doesn’t fit current circumstances, or gets in the way of discovering who we really are, as opposed to who our family expects us to be. Those heard-them-a-hundred-times stories can be as full of minefields as wisdom.

Just Above Bone is approximately 200 pages long and chronicles my story-filled journey into my family’s past, with an emphasis on my family's matriarchs. Newly aware of the power of story, I travel from a ranch in Idaho to an island off the coast of Denmark with various stops along the way gathering, examining, and wrestling with the hand-me-down history that made me who I am.

Why do we continue to tell that story? Why do we continue to tell that story THAT way? I ask again and again with surprising results. Although my search raises serious issues, the overall tone of the book is light-hearted, forgiving, and fun.

With permission, I also includes a few examples from friends’ families. Turns out there are broad similarities in how families tell their histories even across diverse cultures, and real reasons why many of us might want to take a good look at those same-old, same-old family stories.

This is a book that goes beyond one family and their place in American history. It is about how story can help us find firm footing amid the chaos of change. It is a love-poem to storytellers, a roadmap to roots, an exercise in finding home. It is about taking control of one’s life and one’s story and how to recognize real wisdom in the modern mobile world.

It sounds too simple to be true, but when you change your story; you change everything.

Just Above Bone

A Memoir

by Jerrie Hurd

Introduction

My family owned a sheep ranch located in the foothills just above the town of Bone, Idaho. As a family, we used to describe ourselves as living “just above Bone.” We meant that literally. We were a hardworking people, not much given to fancy figures of speech. All in all, it was a good place to grow up, but I never planned to stay there. By the time I was nineteen, I was studying in Salzburg, Austria, and trying to pretend that I knew things that more sophisticated than how to stack hay and drive a farm truck with multiple gears.

My rough edges were many. I’d never seen an opera or been in an art museum. I didn’t know how to hail a cab. The fact that I’d spent long hours of my childhood reading every book I could find wasn’t helping me as much as I’d thought. But never, not once, did I entertained the idea of giving up and going home. More powerful than the books I’d read were the stories I’d absorbed. I knew I came from a long line of strong women who’d succeeded in all kinds of difficult circumstances. Salzburg was no biggie by comparison. All I had to do was trust myself to figure it out. And I did.

Family stories are foundational. I relied on that as a student, but years later, I’d forgotten how important those old stories were, until it slapped me in the face one afternoon

I was critiquing manuscripts at the end of a three-day writers’ conference. Mid-afternoon, I sat down with a thirty-something writer who was working on a novel about three generations of women—mothers and daughters—who seemed to do nothing but increase each other’s misery. It was a well-written, if melancholy, book that readers, I suspected, would find a downer, so I asked the author, “Why did you want to write this story?”

That’s a deceptively simple question that I usually have to ask several times before getting to the core. This writer is the exception. Without hesitation, she answers, “I wanted to understand why all the women in my family marry men we don’t love. I mean, God forbid one of us should actually break the cycle.”

I was startled, not because she was so clear-eyed about her central narrative, not because of her bitterness, and not because I didn’t believe her. Families run these kinds of patterns all the time. I was startled because I hadn’t realized the book was autobiographical. And—more to the point—I’d recognized similarities between the generations of her family and my own. Actually, I thought the similarities were nearly universal. Except for the particulars, she could have been writing about almost any set of mothers and daughters, mine included, with one huge exception. In my family, in addition to stories of overcoming difficult circumstances, we tell great love stories.

The author shook her head and continued. She felt trapped. Her family had a pattern of failed relationships. So why had she expected her marriage to be different? “It’s like they gave me a script. I can follow the family script or struggle against it. Either way, the script owns me.”

“The script owns you?”

She shot me an incredulous glance. “Isn’t it obvious? Following the family script means an incredibly strong mother-daughter bond because the women in my family are forever commiserating with one another about our failed loves. We never let anyone else in. On the other hand, if I took a chance on real love, I’d lose the support of my family, who got me through one bad marriage already. Given my family’s background, how likely is it that I would recognize real love even if I found it?” She shrugged. “How do you make some kind of Disneyfied happy ending out of that?”

I wasn’t used to being challenged quite so directly. Worse, I’m feeling increasingly uncomfortable. The more she talks, the more I wonder about my family and our love stories. Is that also a family script? If so, how have those stories—that family pattern—affected my life? At the same time, I’m mentally resisting the idea. Nobody takes family stories seriously. I didn’t. Or hadn’t for a long time. What’s more, I didn’t want to think about this, much less take the time to investigate it. I have other plans, other projects. And yet, another part of me is screaming: “PAY ATTENTION!”

The importance of family stories can be explained in Aesop terms. Take the famous Aesop fable of the ants and the grasshopper. The ants work all summer putting food away while the grasshopper fiddles. When winter comes, the hungry grasshopper knocks on the ants’ door looking for dinner. The usual moral is something like: Work hard. Don’t fiddle the summer way or you risk being hungry come winter.” Ok, fine, but I want to know who kept those ants from dying of boredom—all winter long—if not that fiddling grasshopper?

         Here’s the thing: If my family gave me an ant’s point of view, likely I will have to make a big shift to appreciate silly, seemingly slothful grasshoppers. On the other hand, if I come from a grasshopper family, likely I’ve learned to look down on steadier, plodding lifestyles that are just not cool. Now, think what happens when a grasshopper marries an ant, or an ant hires a grasshopper. Story is serious stuff—like it or not.

Before our scheduled hour was up, I tried to explain to the author that my family tells love stories—something very different from the pattern in her novel. I wanted to her to understand that, at some level, families and individuals choose how to tell their stories, and that she could change her novel and her life if she wanted to—but she shook her head. Her novel was autobiographical; therefore, she felt constrained by real events. She didn’t think she could lie about who she is or about her family’s history.

Maybe it goes without saying that we cannot separate who we are from where we came from. I can act all grown-up and tell myself that I’m my own person, but, like a reflex, when I cook, I cook the way my mother cooked. When I open my mouth to talk politics, I sound like my father. When I’m shopping for clothes, pink is not a possibility: my grandmother hated pink. Those are the little things. The big thing is my family’s love stories. I’d always considered myself luckier than most because my family tells great love stories, but there is a hazard. If I listen long enough, I could spend a lifetime expecting to be swept off my feet. What happens when our lives don’t turn out like the stories we’ve heard?

Several years ago, I took a class from the novelist Ursula K. LeGuin, who was a great believer in the power of story, but not the kind of story that dominates blockbuster movies and bestselling books. She preferred “carrier-bag stories,” her phrase. Even in pre-history, bringing down a mastodon was likely an event that demanded the telling of a story. But killing a mastodon didn’t happen every day. Gathering seeds and roots and berries and snaring small game in nets was the regular routine. For that you don’t need a spear, you need a carrier-bag, a place to put the things you’ve gathered including the medicine bundle, the talismans and the stories that transfer culture—the stories that literally tell the group how to get through hard times—this winter and next winter and the one after that. Even in the Twenty-First Century, most families tell stories that center on how they survived, started over, or managed to overcome great odds. The message is simple: our ancestors survived. We can, too, because we’re part of a long tradition of brave, resourceful people.

If you go beyond that central theme, there are other stories, told less often, but not less powerful. After that meeting with the young novelist who saw her family’s history as a script, I began to wonder what was in my family’s carrier-bag? Turns out, that’s not a question with a simple answer. I poked around, not really knowing what to expect. At minimum, I hoped to stop running patterns I don’t understand, like never wearing pink. Mostly, however, I wanted to understand those love stories. I’m pretty sure my family’s track record in the relationship department is no better than most. So, what do we gain by telling ourselves love stories?

 I had no idea where this project would take me. I traveled from that ranch in Idaho to an island off the coast of Denmark with various stops along the way. I talked to aunts, uncles, cousins and friends of the family, anyone who would listen and try to answer my questions. My understanding of story and the power of story grew and changed as I grew and changed. Along the way, I created a mantra for myself and my project: Why do we continue to tell that story? Why do we tell that story that particular way? Those might seem like simple questions, but they aren’t.

This book is the result of those questions and that journey. I’m sharing my carrier-bag, my collection of the strange, wonderful, inspiring, heartrending discoveries that I made. I’m sharing them with the hope that others will be inspired to gather and examine their own stories. Let me be clear, I was not doing genealogy. Yes, I gathered some documents as I went along, but I wasn’t focused on names and dates—the things that I have to write down to remember. I was gathering stories—the stories that I can’t forget, even when I might want to—the stories that my family uses to explain who we are in a sense that is much larger, much more significant, than simply where we were born or how we died. And, yes, I know that sometimes those stories are exaggerated and not always true. However, I was surprised to discover that most were connected to real events. In some cases, the stories include details that the teller couldn’t have known were historically significant. The teller was simply repeating things he or she had heard from a previous generation or generations, but when I took the time to check, I was impressed at how accurate the collective memory is. That said, I don’t think stories have to be historically correct to be powerful. They just need to be repeated and believed, which is why I kept coming back to my mantra, repeatedly asking why my family continues to tell a particular story with a particular slant or purpose? What, exactly, are we saying about who we think we are? Trust me, those questions will reveal layers and layers of surprises including the root reason a group of individuals continues to identify as a family. It’s the stories, more than anything else, that establish a set of core values, a strong sense of belonging, and a feeling of deep roots.

In the end, I came to believe that knowing my family’s storied background might be as important as knowing my family’s medical history. And I’m not alone in that belief. It has been documented that people who experience a genealogical void often have serious identity problems. Hence the drive for adopted children to find their “real” parents and for African Americans, who have a slavery background, to make a genetic connection to a particular part of the African continent.

         I’m lucky. No genealogical void. I have a rich and colorful background—plenty of stories, more than enough surprises, and lots of dirt. Doesn’t every family have at least one pirate and/or Mormon polygamist in their past? The trick is deciding the takeaway. Dirt is where things get muddy. It’s also where things grow. I uncovered stories I’d never heard before and stories I’d heard too many times in too many conflicting versions. In every case, I never assumed the first version was the right one. I always expected that if I turned the dirt one more time, I’d find a different perspective, something wiser or wittier. In that, the old stories never failed me even when some family members did.

         “What do you want?

         “Why?”

         “Who asked you to look into this?”

I sat back, surprised, at how protective some were of our shared history.

First lesson: old stories have a sacred quality. That doesn’t mean you can’t question them and, maybe, give them a new twist. It does mean that you will need to show respect. You will need to listen. I mean listen-listen and, maybe, listen again. That’s ok. It will be worthwhile.

So, let’s begin . . .