The strange thing about Moth stories is that none of the tricks we use to make ourselves loved or respected by others work in the ways you would imagine they ought to. The tales of how clever we were, how wise, how we won, they mostly fail. The practiced jokes and the witty one-liners all crash and burn up on a Moth stage.

Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything.

Having a place the story starts and a place it’s going: that’s important.

Telling your story, as honestly as you can, and leaving out the things you don’t need, that’s vital.

The Moth connects us, as humans. Because we all have stories. Or perhaps, because we are, as humans, already an assemblage of stories. And the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin color, gender, race, or attitudes, but we don’t see, we can’t see, the stories. And once we hear each other’s stories we realize that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery.

The Moth teaches us not to judge by appearances. It teaches us to listen. It reminds us to empathize.

And now, with these fifty wonderful stories, it teaches us to read.

This is an introduction for The Moth: This Is a True Story, 2015.

VII

MUSIC AND THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE IT

“I think that night may have lasted a thousand years, one for every ocean.”

Hi, By the Way: Tori Amos

Hi, by the way.

I met her first on a tape, and then we spoke on the phone late at night, and then one night I went to see her play piano and sing.

It was a tiny Notting Hill brasserie, and Tori had already started when I got there. She saw me come in and smiled like the lighting of a beacon, played “Tear in Your Hand” to welcome me in. The room was almost empty, save for the owner, who was having his birthday meal in the middle of the room. Tori sang “Happy Birthday to You,” then a song she’d recently written called “Me and a Gun,” pure and dark and alone.

Later, we went off through Notting Hill and talked like old friends who are meeting for the very first time. On the empty subway platform she sang and danced and acted out the video she had made that day for “Silent All These Years”—one moment she was a Tori in a box, spinning around, the next a small girl dancing past a piano . . .

That was several years ago.

I know Tori a little better now than I did that night, but the wonderment she inspired then has not faded with time or with familiarity.