when you're in the middle of a story, it isn't a story at all but rather a confusion, a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood, like a house in a whirlwind or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard are powerless to stop it. it's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you're telling it to yourself or someone else. 


(stories we tell - sarah polley, 2012)