Story of My Life

True confession: The school bell that was stolen from St. Agnes Parochial in Avon, New York, more than 70 years ago, the theft of which, the sisters warned, was a sin against the school, the faith, and the pope? Richard Collins did it. Now 83, Collins swiped the bell because it was the bane of his existence, earning him demerits every time he arrived late. Today he says of that sin, “I kept it locked in my heart over all those years.”

“What did you end up doing with the school bell?” Collins’s grandson Sean asks.

“I still have it,” Collins says. “It’s by my bedside, and I joyfully ring it every now and then.”

Collins makes this admission in a confessional of sorts, but a secular one—and one that promises not confidentiality (or absolution) but the chance to leave a permanent oral record with the Library of Congress. He and his grandson, along with some 27,000 other people since 2003, have chosen to bare their souls in a dimly lit soundproof booth operated by StoryCorps, a nationwide oral-history project run by the radio documentarian Dave Isay. Short segments of their interviews air on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition every Friday, and in November Penguin Press is publishing a compilation of 50 of them as a book called Listening Is an Act of Love.

StoryCorps starts with a simple setup: Two people enter the booth, look each other in the eye, and talk for 40 minutes. A facilitator does the recording and at the end snaps a picture of the participants and gives them a CD of their interview. There are two permanent booths in New York—one in Grand Central Terminal and one in lower Manhattan—and three mobile booths that travel around the U.S.

In the book, a man sobs as he says that until that moment, sitting across from his 38-year-old daughter, no adult had ever asked him how he felt about his father’s long-ago suicide. A 20-year-old expresses appreciation and awe to his grandmother, who had rescued him as a damaged 10-year-old and raised him with enthusiasm and devotion.Two inmates recount the stupefying boredom of prison life, one of them lamenting that smelling exhaust from garbage trucks is the highlight of his day because it reminds him of his free life on the streets. “That is sorry,” he says. “And the really messed-up part about it is I put myself here.”

People are deep. The StoryCorps experience unfolds in stages, from the process of recording to the act of hearing the result on the radio or reading it in the book. Within the booth, there’s the interaction with a loved one, the chance to say whatever’s on your mind, the sense that you’re speaking for the ages, for history. “StoryCorps, at its most basic, tells people that they matter and that they won’t be forgotten,” Isay says. Almost everybody cries.

People leave with more than the CD. Listening Is an Act of Love quotes a schoolteacher who was so blown away that she has returned to conduct more than 70 interviews with loved ones, students, and strangers. “It feels like something in your brain opens up, and you can expose parts of yourself too fragile to expose to the noisy world,” she says. “And you can engage each other in a way that you can’t in ordinary life. It also makes me feel as if I’m speaking to people in the future. It gives me a toehold into another world.”

One woman wrote Isay that the interview turned out to be the last chance for her and her dad to properly say how much they meant to each other—he died days later, and the family played excerpts of the CD at his funeral. “Most StoryCorps interviews revolve around the three great themes of human existence—birth, love, and death,” Isay writes in the book. “But from these themes emerge an astonishing array of stories.” In an age of fake reality shows, the actual reality of people’s lives, encapsulated in this way, manages to make gripping radio and to read like a page-turner (it’s also kind of a tearjerker).

Then there’s the project’s archival role. Like the WPA recordings of everyday people made in the 1930s and ’40s, the StoryCorps stories feel both epic and intimate. “They remind us who we are as Americans,” Isay says. “We’re a people who go through our days and commit small acts of kindness and courage and love our families.” The StoryCorps interviews are packed with evidence, sorely needed right now, that we’re not just a nation of wayward blonde heiresses and egomaniacs who lie to get us into war.