If there’s anything I love more than fiction, it’s narrative nonfiction. Especially listening to it. Especially if it’s in podcast form. Especially if it’s an episode from my forever-and-ever-favourite narrative nonfiction podcast, “This American Life”. And S-Town ticks all the boxes for me. It’s like a 7-episode, bingeable, version of a “This American Life” episode, it’s in audio form, and the story grabs you by the collar and doesn’t let go. I can’t even begin to explain what the story did with my perceptions, my nerves, my patience. I managed to listen to the whole thing within a few days and I’m saying this to brag about my self-control skills. If you really let yourself go with the flow and with the story, you don’t need more than a day. But I’m raving. Let me tell you what this is actually about.
s-town, the short of it
S-Town is a podcast produced by the same people who produce “This American Life” and “Serial”. If you don’t know any of these, please stop reading now and go look for them on Youtube or in your podcast app. You are missing seriously good story entertainment. If you do know these, you also know they are probably among the best there is in narrative nonfiction. “Serial” tells a true-crime story and “This American Life” is an award-winning weekly radio show which explores a wide range of topics through personal narratives, interviews and documentary-style reporting.
The listeners of “This American Life” often send emails, pitching a story which might raise the interest of the producers and might be turned into a radio episode. This is how S-Town came to be. In 2012, a man from Alabama named John B. McLemore sent an email and a reporter named Brian Reed read it and decided to go with it. Reed started investigating the goings-on in the small-town in Alabama John had been living in all his life, and the rest, as they say, is history.
capital-S Storytelling
What S-Town is about, you’re asking? Let me tell you without telling you, because I really don’t want to spoil it for you, you deserve better. Each of the seven episodes made me reconsider and reframe what the whole thing is “about”. In all honesty, the way the story is told makes you throw away this useless question we ask when we come across a story, any story. What it’s about. Well, Reed starts investigating the crimes John wrote about in his emails. It turns out, the townspeople are honest people who just want to lead undisturbed lives and care little about crime. As it turns out further, life is not quiet at all for those involved in treasure hunting and much less quiet for a very peculiar character who seems to be just a bit too much concerned with climate change. Somebody will turn out dead by the end, but death is not the point. Life is.
When an antique clock breaks, a clock that has been telling time for 200 or 300 years, fixing it can be a real puzzle. There can be hundreds of tiny individual pieces, each of which needs to interact with the others precisely. The few people left in the world who know how to do this kind of thing rely on witness marks to guide their way. A witness mark can be a small dent or a whole that one held a screw.
This is how the first episode starts and I how it hooked me. If old clocks are involved, that’s something for me. I have two pieces 150 years old each and was lucky enough to have found a wonderful clockmaker to get them working again. John is also a clockmaker, as it turns out. And a gardener. And a mathematician. And a chemist. And a caregiver for his elderly mother. Reed interweaves clocks and the telling of time in his storytelling as a way to explore the complexity of life and the very unique worldview of John, his main character, after all.
moral aspects
But not all is flowers and sunshine. To paraphrase Vox, S-Town tells a very good story, which should not have been told at all. There is some trouble down the line and the story gets more and more uncomfortable, especially in episodes 5 and 6. The podcast turns out to be a character study which delves deep into the habits, personality and private lives of many of the characters involved. And this is the fall and beauty of narrative nonfiction. With fiction, no lines are crossed. You can read a story which goes to your gut, but there is some comfort in knowing it didn’t happen. Not the way it was told, not to the people in the story. With nonfiction, it gets tricky. It happened as it was told, and it happened to real people. Making a story out of it could be seen as genius or sick. Or sick genius. Very contradictory, in any case.
wrapping it up
I asked chatGPT if it’s moral to listen to S-Town. It blurted out a long statement in the all-knowing, holier-than-thou style it has. But it does make a couple of good points. We should be mindful of what we read and listen to, and respectful of the lives of other people. Entertainment for the sake of entertainment leads nowhere. What listening to S-Town made clear to me is that we can’t judge, and we don’t know where someone is coming from and what they’re going through. If you do decide to give it a shot, be kind and keep an open mind.
your thoughts?