August 22, 2026

Why We Tell Stories

We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—'Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought.'

In East of Eden, Steinbeck steps outside his story to speak directly to the reader about why people write and read fiction at all. He was drafting the novel in the early 1950s as an extended letter to his two young sons, Thom and John, hoping to pass on the hard truths of his own family's history. The book itself grew out of generations of pain—jealousy, cruelty, and estrangement—and Steinbeck believed that naming such suffering honestly was the only way to move through it. His point is simple: isolation is one of the deepest human hurts, and telling the truth to another person is how we transform it into something bearable.