I got an email the other day about my ten-year high school reunion.  Ten years since Grandview Heights High School, skipping Mr. DiSabado’s gym class every day for two weeks without the buff, classically dense P.E teach ever catching on (just ran right out the side doors during one of the obligatory laps at the start of class and jogged home to a two hour lunch); since walking to school in the morning thinking about College, that Sacred Institution where life would suddenly open up (it did); since sulky nights at Short North coffee shops with Hannah and Ellen, cynical as black eyeliner and so wise to the ways of the world; since my wounded pondering over why Dustin Smurdon liked Jessica Krynovich even though I was the witty one in French class; since Mr. Bibler, after all of my daily harassing-flirting with him, sighed one day and said, “Sarah, you’re an old soul” and left me carrying that thought around like a badge of honor; since Rachel Brown’s valevictorian speech in which she said, “someday, when Leslie is a famous actress in New York, and Nick Erwin is designing spaceships for NASA, and Sarah Menkedick is writing for The New York Times…”

Well, here we are, ten years later (ten years later!) and all those narratives have shot off like runners eager at the start line.  I got an email from Kris Mehling – now Kris something-German-sounding-with-an-L.  She spelled my name without the “h” and I remembered the seven Sarah’s in our class of 2000 – of the seven of them, I only knew Sarah Hinkle, thin and distant and frighteningly hipster long before I knew what hipster was, and Sarah Weese, my old friend from snow days who was the exact opposite of the word bashful.  I never wrote Kris back, but then I was hit with a sudden onslaught of Facebook invites from vaguely familiar people, the kind of people you run into at a pizza shop on some trip home to Ohio saying afterwards “oh my god, was that really Kristin Parker?” and then thinking about French class and how you listened with purposeful melancholy to Sarah Machlaclan and lay awake at night talking on the phone with your feet propped on the wall: high school. Instead of accepting the invites, I spent a haunted evening perusing the profiles one by one, looking at pictures of husbands and kids, of likes and comments and the Pollack-esque splattered stories of wall pages; the modern collages of personal identity.

The concept of narrative is fresh in my mind recently; it’s emerged in so many different ways and places that it has the distinct, intentional feel of fateful intervention.  In novels, in marriage plans, in high school reunions, in conversations with MFA grad students, narrative has come up: the way a narrative goes spooling out over the years and connects different versions of people at different times, connects goals and dreams and tendencies, like a patient ball of string unrolling and enveloping trees, cutting across lawns, tracing the edges of rivers and slipping downstream. Annie Cusack married Todd Lovegrove.  The bitchy popular girls got fat and became hairdressers.  My friends are poets and lawyers.  People are married and have kids, or they’re struggling artists or tall glamorous architects; I’m incredulous to see them in these cheery photos on suburban lawns graced by fall leaves, on manicured patios, in baseball stadiums, in New York coffee shops doing exactly what I would have imagined years ago – it seems impossible that they’d actually be there, (relatively) grown up, doing what Hannah and Ellen and I invented in hypothetical, ironic, invented narratives.  It seems as if they should’ve disappeared after high school, been frozen in the wax museum of Grandview Heights High School as Bitchy Mandy Davis or Innocent Kristin In Her Gap Overalls.  It seems so improbable that they would go on, grow up to be trashy laundromat owners or well-mannered sandwich-making moms.

But these narratives, once you stumble onto them, are alternatively unbelievable and satisfying and reassuring.  The realization of all those imagined narratives reminds me that my own narrative is not a far departure from what I once imagined it might be, that it has gone on and grown up and also remained linked to the themes I would’ve laid out for it a decade ago.  There is congruency between that 15 and 17-year old self and the Facebook Sarah Menkedick of today, and I think the girl on either end of that decade bookended by graduation and reunion can be pleased with her other half, glimpsed over the arc of those years.  She can see the veined tributaries connecting her former and future self.

Facebook facilitates all of this story-searching, urging us to go sniffing down these narrative pathways of the past, and in doing all of this online voyeurism of high school people I finally came to understand the obsession with the site.  Peter Hessler, in a recent New Yorker piece about his return to the United States after more than a decade in China, talked about the American fixation with narrative.  Americans love to tell stories and they appreciate the satisfaction of a good story.  They relish the narrative form and the way it illustrates changing personal identity.  Hessler contrasts that to the Chinese, who are far less likely to tell dramatic personal stories but far more curious about the wider world than Americans.

So what better outlet for the personal narrative than Facebook?  What clearer expression of this story of one’s identity than Facebook?  There has been much written about the rise and the domination of Facebook, mostly about the lack of privacy and the supposedly disturbing transformation of meaningful social relationships into bite-sized updates and the whimsical decision to “friend” or “unfriend.”  One piece in The New York Review of Books analyzed how Facebook confirms French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory that we define ourselves by the “capital” – social, cultural, symbolic  – that we accumulate and advertise in social spaces, and that our aesthetic preferences are shaped much more by the need to position ourselves in certain groups and classes of people than they are by some inherent artistic value or appreciation.  Hence we are the pages we like, the articles we link to, the pithy witticisms we share – and our listed quotations and authors and television series aren’t so much about our discerning or rebellious tastes as they are about positioning ourselves as we’d like to be seen and adopted by certain groups.

It’s an interesting theory and one I can get on board with, but I think it misses the point that Facebook also allows us to scratch what might be a fundamental American itch: telling our stories.  The U.S is perhaps the most individualist country on Earth.  Be yourself.  Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.  Follow your dreams.  Take your own path.  Listen to your heart’s desires.  Help yourself.  Yourself, yourself, yourself – and your stories.  Your individuality matters; in fact, it matters far more than many other things, such as, say, “group harmony,” that most Asian of values.  Facebook encourages that prided American individuality in the safest of ways – you choose the photo that exemplifies you, you choose how to define yourself in the appropriate likes and preferences and connections and concise summaries, you get to tell your own, individual story.  And then you get to read that of others.

So it was nearly one in the morning and, not tired, I was sprawled on the bed poring over Facebook profiles, indulging in a sort of narrative addiction.  Facebook thin-slices, to borrow from Malcolm Gladwell, the most critical information and makes it representative of the whole in a way that surprisingly resonates, that has you saying, “yes, of course, that’s Bethany Powell.”  Married, in Columbus Ohio, two kids, a house in the burbs, a family photo, the appropriate wall posts about the 4^th of July.  Or the shot of the prom queen in a bus in some far-off corner of the world, just off-beat enough to be slightly interesting, but still with her “Elle Style” page and the same hardened cheekbones, still, presumably, with the frozen smile and practiced giggle and dull isolating knowledge that beauty precedes all.  The Facebook profile confirms what we’d like to believe, gives us just enough of the narrative to send the rest of it gushing back like a huge headache of memory.

High school relived at 1 o’clock in the morning, age 27: writing that speech for the Rotary 4-Way Speech Contest that compared (in front of a room of old, pot-bellied, church-going Rotarians) the persecution of homosexuals to the holocaust and won, beating bored diatribes against the evils of marijuana and teen pregnancy.  The inside jokes – so many, Mr. Kegley’s remarkable lack of personality that earned him the moniker “The Egg”, Madame Craddock’s hatred of cat-killing Mr. Richards.  The small hurts and wounds and worries, the sound of so many footsteps in a narrow hallway between classes and the metallic clang of lockers; the ecstatic-sad feeling of seeing the barren lockers with squeaky swinging doors, emptied out with only the scruffy hints of stickers on their walls, in the early days of June.  The sly thrill of being an honors student and getting to work in the guidance office, swiping gold slips from Mr. Conners’ desk drawer when he went to the bathroom and using these slips with substitute teachers to get friends out of class (“I’m sorry, Hailey Stroup is needed in the guidance office 5^th period”).  Bantering with Mr. Woodland, the woodsy biology professor with a mustache I always had a thing for; the way he said, “Alright, Menkedick,” with a grudging genuine laugh when I’d bantered him out.  Mr. Kilbourne’s 11^th grade history class, two hours long, the bulk of the afternoon – Kilbourne, a retired American University professor, telling us stories about hanging out with CBS CEO Bill Paley at D.C. parties and falling in love with a girl called Amanda but being too cocky to realize she was the one; making us read Zinn and Todd Gitlin and Doris Kearns Goodwin and write real critical papers instead of Mr. Ballinger’s bullshitty regurgitations and me staying up ‘til 3 a.m. writing a haughty, bellowing, worshipful paper about “The People’s History Of The United States” and all of its little-known and hideous injustices; the way Kilbourne relished the vocabulary words he gave us and recited them, trenchant, bellicose, gerrrrmmane, like a purr.

That was high school, those and many other things.  And those narratives – the bantering with teachers, the mischeviousness, the swelling sense of right and wrong and injustice, the geeky love of history – continue on up through today, to the email from Kris Mehling-now-something-German-with-an-L in my inbox that said, “Your address: Grandview high school reunion.”

And again I think, there is something comforting about that.  There’s always a certain shudder involved with the past and the who-I-was, but there’s a reassurance to that narrative, too.  Browsing all those Facebook profiles, so many wall postings and links and photos, was the comfort of narrative itself, the comfort of a story unfolding with underlying themes as opposed to the floating isolation of the here and now.

In last night’s The Wire episode, D’Angelo speculated that The Great Gatsby’s main point was that you can’t try and get too far from who you’ve been in the past; that ultimately, it’s what’s made you and to attempt to forget or fly in the face of it leads to tragedy.  In his context that’s both a damning and a resignedly reassuring analysis.  And forgive me for the whiplash like-shift from The Wire to Facebook, but I think Facebook strikes a hypnotic balance between the damning and the reassuring, and gives us just enough of the narratives we want to read and create to keep us coming back.  It dangles stories from high school, from other places and times and loves and mindsets, in front of us and also lets us create ourselves as separate from and linked to these places.  It tells us our story in snippets and boxes, and allows us to fill in the details late at night in bed, remembering the past, tracing the narrative.