Telling Stories in Order to Live

The title of my chapter Telling Stories in Order to Live , is taken from the writer Joan Didion, who once said ‘We live entirely, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ . . . which freeze the shifting phantasmagoria [of] our actual experience’. What Didion suggests is that lives are messy, seemingly devoid of rhyme or reason. It is the job of the writer to find meaning amid the chaos, to discern a narrative which makes sense of the disarray. But writers of fiction or journalism are not the only ones who discern meanings from the messiness of life. So do sociologists. Ken Plummer was a master of this. Anyone familiar with his writing knows that he was very fond of lists. Pick up any of his books and you will find lists of key figures in gay and lesbian studies; lists of classic works of sexual theory from 1904 on; lists of possible sexual futures. He brought to all of his work an interest in inventorying social life and discerning patterns. He also brought a symbolic interactionist’s sensibility. This chapter explores the sociology of storytelling in Ken’s work and discusses my own work in relation to projects on LGBTQ life and also the experiences of Holocaust survivors and their descendants.