Constructing the tellability of intergenerational memory narratives in collective remembering in StoryCorps,a digital memory-sharing platform

Introduction

The widespread presence of online storytelling and memory-sharing platforms has greatly impacted mnemonic practices. Personal memory telling, which used to be a close community-based, vernacular activity, has also become a digitally mediated public practice, resulting in a broad range of narratives stored in freely available online archived databases. Moreover, the proliferation of storytelling and memory-sharing platforms foregrounds that these web tools shape and inform collective remembering by recording, displaying, storing, and editing private memories in narrative. The recent digital turn in memory studies has addressed many questions about the effect of digitalization on the reconceptualization of memory and forgetting. These include the changing nature of collective memory, the constant presence of the archived past with its power to shape the present, the single story versus contested nature of memory, and the media consciousness or lack of consciousness in sharing memories (Hoskins, 2018; Mandolessi, 2023). Moreover, the digital transition has resulted in the unquestionable visibility of the narrative process with which memories are brought to the public and the transparency of identity construction in these narratives. StoryCorps, a digital memory-sharing platform, also builds on our affinity to share stories “big and small” about autobiographical memories, encouraging compassion and connections (About StoryCorps, n.d.). People tell and listen to stories primarily because they find them a source of alignment. The move from intimate and private to broadly shared and public shifts the focus from the content of past events to the narrative performance features. The question emerges concerning how these autobiographical memory narratives are told to be relatable, relevant, and engaging for the broad but random audiences of the online digital memory archives.

“If we take the time to listen, we’ll find wisdom and poetry and beauty in the stories all around us. And that we all wanna know that we matter and that we won’t be forgotten,” said David Isay in his Peabody Award acceptance speech in 2006. Isay received the award as the chief architect of StoryCorps, a non-profit public digital storytelling platform launched in 2003 to encourage people to tell their stories in public and for the public (About StoryCorps, n.d.). The program combines digital recording and archiving with the traditions of vernacular storytelling to focus on the individuals whose voluntary but intentional participation transforms them into voices in American collective memory. Participants record their stories in interview-based conversations in studios called StoryBooths after a brief introduction to oral history techniques or on their own with a free mobile app. Narrative recordings are archived with the participants’ permission at the Folklife Center of the Library of Congress and in a searchable online archive, the largest single collection of human voices (About StoryCorps, n.d.). To incorporate multimodality, voice recording cuts or subsequently animated short digital videos of stories are also available on StoryCorps’ and National Public Radio’s (NPR) websites (About StoryCorps, n.d.). NPR’s StoryCorps program airs selected memory narratives related to recent American and world events, and they cluster stories thematically on their website. Thus, StoryCorps’ digital memory policy to simultaneously collect, archive, edit, and publicize private memory narratives is pivotal in shaping collective remembering by mediating memory and setting the standards for memorability.

Autobiographical memory retrieval in StoryCorps relies on narrative. Narrative is the highly conventional cognitive and social organizational structure of memory because it offers the linguistic, thematic, and performative framework to make meaning and structure remembering (Linde, 2015; Wertsch and Roediger, 2008). Narratives frame the storytellers’ experiences in social-cultural knowledge to contextualize, claim, and reinforce their identity. They often include intergenerationally transmitted episodes about the narrator’s ancestors or extended family members to explain identity positions across time and generations. In digital memory sharing, intergenerational memory is visibly located between private personal memories and collective remembering, created and shaped by both memory systems. Within the memory-narrative dyad of remembering, the narrative dimension of tellability is particularly interesting because it ensures meaning-making by locating how the narrator approximates the story to their audience (Ochs and Capps, 2001). Tellability entails the individual memory holder’s explicit communicative intention to find private personal memory within collective remembering and make it memorable. Volunteers tell their private autobiographical memories in StoryCorps to be archived in a digital collective memory site where individual stories connect to other stories randomly rather than being subsumed into any single narrative of collective memory. Storytellers make their private autobiographical memories memorable by constructing narrative tellability, sometimes using intergenerational memories at the center. Thus, StoryCorps evolves as a digital collective memory site rather than a single-theme memory site as it foregrounds the value of autobiographical storytelling within American culture, embracing many experiences and values.

In the present contribution, I examine the narrative structure of autobiographical memories recalling intergenerational memories published on the digital memory-sharing platform of StoryCorps. Narrative and discourse analysis highlights how personal autobiographical memories intersect in narrative with digital collective memory on the two levels of language and content. The approach reveals new information on how personal narratives in StoryCorps are mediated by digital technologies, making them visible, public, and archived. I focus on how narrators construct tellability using intergenerational family memories in their autobiographical accounts. I argue that in this setting, narrative tellability accomplishes three goals: (1) it positions the individual storyteller within the historical continuum of collective remembering; (2) it ensures memorability, the long-term quality of these memories to be remembered; and (3) it displays the narrative consciousness about digital memory mediation. The article consists of two parts. First, I summarize the present scholarship on the structural and conceptual connection between narrative and memory and explain how StoryCorps fits this process as a digital memory-sharing platform. Second, I analyze four individual autobiographical memories with intergenerational memory episodes from the StoryCorps database to look at how the narrative changes and adapts when the storyteller strategically centers intergenerational memory to ensure that storytelling is a social-cultural responsibility. With the analysis, I aim to answer the following questions. What are the implications of telling intergenerational memories in autobiographical memory sharing? How does the storyteller employ tellability to make the story meaningful and memorable for an imagined audience in a digital archive of autobiographical memory narratives? What are the chief narrative tools that enable tellability and memorability in a digitally archived storytelling platform? By answering these questions, the analysis aims to define the cultural function of tellability as the responsibility to remember and share autobiographical memories as part of collective memory. Moreover, it contributes to understanding the structural connection between memory and narrative.

Tellability and the narrative structure of autobiographical and intergenerational memory in digital collective remembering

Memory is not a unified ability but a dynamic, integrated system that entails both a physiological and a social experience (Fivush, 2011: 561). One of its most complex forms is autobiographical memory, a uniquely human capacity to remember one’s life with a subjective sense of self in time. It is a social-cultural skill that integrates remembered single, recurring, and extended events and knowledge into a coherent story of self that is probed through sociocultural practices (Fivush, 2011; Fivush and Graci, 2017). A recent finding by Rubin (2019: 6) states that autobiographical memory is not stored and retrieved as ready when needed; it is rather dynamically generated at recall. It is embedded in the rememberers’ local and cultural background shaped by the interactions in which it emerges. Research has shown that autobiographical memory telling distinguishes and explains remembered events concerning the self by fulfilling three chief functions. First, autobiographical memory defines the self across time and contexts and ensures the continuity of the self by connecting past experiences with present concerns. Second, it positions the self in relation to others by prompting and sustaining social and emotional bonds. Third, engaging with autobiographical memories protects one’s sense of self and caters to mental well-being (Fivush, 2011: 573–576; Maki et al., 2015: 2–3). These functions pinpoint that autobiographical memory is a complex personal mechanism using narrative form for the flexible and dynamically adapting recall of experiences. It never stands alone and cannot be interpreted without its narrative connection to the collective memories of the individual rememberer’s culture.

Contemporary approaches to the interrelatedness of individual and collective memories are rooted in Maurice Halbwachs’ (1980 [1950]) theory, claiming that personal and collective memories are inseparable systems of remembering. “The collective memory, for its part, encompasses the individual memories while remaining distinct from them” (p. 51). Individual and collective memories are interactive, making collective memory more than the sum of individual stories about the past (Lenart-Cheng, 2020; Reese and Fivush, 2008). With the digital turn in memory studies, collective memory is reconceptualized “as a process, mediated and remediated by multiple media with the participation of dynamic communities that perform rather than represent the past” (Mandolessi, 2023: 1514). Thus, digitally mediated collective remembering operates as a complex dynamic system in which heterogeneous private autobiographical memories interact on multiple virtual levels. According to Mandolessi (2023: 1514), collective memory in the digital era undergoes four major changes: (1) it functions as a digital archive; (2) it shifts the emphasis from the single-story nature of narrative to the cultural form of the database; (3) it blends human and non-human agents, and (4) it shifts from “mnemonic objects to mnemonic assemblages” including persons. StoryCorps can be considered an emerging digital collective memory because, as a digital archive and a cultural database, it provides access to individually recorded autobiographical memories, which become mnemonic assemblages of persons, discourses, and narratives in dynamic complex relatedness.

Autobiographical memory may contain whole or partial intergenerational memories that reframe the personal experiences of past family members into historically validated personal and cultural narratives (Merrill et al., 2019). Intergenerational memory refers to mental and linguistic representations of a series of past events drawn from the lives of the rememberer’s ancestors. Svob et al. (2016) state that intergenerational memory narratives often constitute only a few facts and vague references lacking depth and detail, forming a select group of stories that can be a part of detailed autobiographies but are not identical to them. Intergenerational memories can be acquired in two ways. First, family members directly pass on the multiply recontextualized retellings of intrafamilial experiences transferred to them. Second, descendants use indirect methods of interviewing close or distant family members or researching the archives for facts related to the family. Thus, intergenerational memory is uniquely positioned at the intersection of autobiographical and collective memories. I argue that in terms of identity work, intergenerational memory relates to the individual who remembers his ancestors this way, so it is part of the rememberer’s autobiographical memory. However, regarding content and detail, it depends on collective memory. Narrators do not merely repeat events that happened to their ancestors but place intergenerational experiences into their autobiographical memory to express an existential dilemma across generations.

Autobiographical, intergenerational, and collective memory depends on narrative as the cognitive and linguistic form that makes memories accessible through the “dialectics between memory and language” (Brockmeier, 2019: 821). Individually experienced events are translated into autobiographical memory by “integrating perspective, interpretation, and evaluation across self, other, and time,” which occur in a narrative (Fivush, 2011: 560). When autobiographical memory is translated into narrative, it functions as the “source, authenticator and destabilizer of autobiographical acts” essential to locate experiential history within the present (Smith and Watson, 2010: 22). Moreover, autobiographical memory narratives are schematized or embedded in past frames of being positioned by the available interpretations of previous stories (Bruner, 2001; Ochs and Capps, 2001; Rubin, 2019). Thus, any memory retold in the form of an autobiographical narrative, with or without intergenerational memories, brings three actors into a dynamic interplay: the social-cultural traditions that contextualize the event sequences by providing the conventions of language and storytelling, the individual rememberer, whose life and past are represented by these conventions, and the audience who hears and aligns with these memories as narratives.

Emphasizing that stories build connections and encourage compassion, StoryCorps defies a single definition of narrative. It mediates autobiographical memory, shifting the narrative’s focus on its impact on listeners instead of its storyline. Narratives focus on a conflict that requires problem-solving within a particular time frame, which may vary from a set period in the past through the progressively unfolding present (Abbott, 2002; Ochs and Capps, 2001; Riessman, 2008). They construct the narrator’s identity on structural, content, and performance levels (Riessman, 2008). Bruner (2001: 26) noted that the narrative’s center is the conflict or turning point, and the narrator retrieves memory and translates it into an event sequence escalating toward the conflict. A turning point connects reality with the speaker’s intentional interpretation by answering the question, “Why tell?” inherent in every story. The perceived answer has implications for the story’s significance, relevance, and the extent to which it confirms culture from the listeners’ perspective (Bruner, 2001: 25–29). In intergenerational memory narratives, the turning point is the inherited memory, which relies on historically and culturally mediated collective memory for detail while explicitly locating personal memory in collective remembering.

Ochs and Capps (2001) suggest that narrative be studied in terms of dimensions, one of which, tellability, expresses the sensationality of the narrated events as well as their significance to interlocutors (p. 34). Its simultaneous focus on the storyline and the audience makes tellability a valuable concept to explore intergenerational memory as a form of memory representing the in-betweenness of autobiographical and collective memories. Tellability defines the narrative’s noteworthiness and newsworthiness, showing whether it makes a point for its audience at its telling and whether it is worth telling because of that point (Baroni, 2011; Ochs and Capps, 2001: 19; Savolainen, 2017). Newsworthiness implies how events can be recontextualized with the meaning of familiar content renegotiated according to the interaction’s context (Norrick, 2000: 106). Its context dependence makes tellability a subjective category because it is impossible to measure objectively the extent to which the story-to-be-told could attract interest on multiple occasions with the changing knowledge of the audience (Baroni, 2011; Ochs and Capps, 2001). Bruner (2001) noted that violating canonicity in a narrative, such as breaching the status quo, demystifying deviations, and making problems visible, enhances its tellability. Moreover, incongruence may originate in the storyteller’s intention to underpin or defy their own or other’s agency to perform autonomous acts governed by their intentional states. Bruner (1994: 41–43) stated that the lack of agency, called “victimicy,” is equally important, as it means that the protagonist responds to someone else’s agency to whom the reported actions are attributed. Agency and the sense of victimhood create broad and flexible grounds for the shared interpretation of distinct life experiences by taking events out of their inertia, while the storyteller controls narrative meaning making through tellability.

Within memory studies, the narrative dimension of tellability translates into the concept of memorability (see also Rigney, 2021: 12–13); when an autobiographical memory narrative is tellable, it is also worth remembering. The tellability and memorability of autobiographical memories do not depend on the empirical verification of their truth, only on how the narrative prompts people’s reflections on their role in life events. As individual tellings, narratives place the storyteller into the surrounding culture and confirm that culture by focusing on its members and their intentions. As part of collective memory, autobiographical memory narratives distinguish the storyteller from the surrounding culture and ensure their unique position by explicitly stating that what happened is worth telling: it is tellable and memorable. In fact, storytelling is part of the culture’s literacy. “Learning to narrate is to acquire a culture’s established ways to conceive . . . of what counts as memory and how remembering” is used in conversations (Brockmeier, 2019: 822). McClellan (2011) finds that autobiographical narratives construct collective identity by negotiating narrators’ insider and outsider status relative to culture. Thus, one story concatenates the two seemingly oppositional goals of making a person fit into a cultural group and elevating them from the group by emphasizing the personal and the idiosyncratic. Since culture is the autobiographical memory narrative’s context, tellability means the storytellers’ cognitive narrative move that embeds their private memories in the dynamic complex system of collective remembering, marking their memorability.

In his seminal work on narrative analysis, William Labov (1972, 1997) identified six communicative functions that narrative clauses fulfill: abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution, and coda. In the memory-narrative landscape, orientation and complicating action present information about the actors (orientation: who, when, where?) and the events (complicating action: what happened?). Evaluation reveals the narrator’s reflections connecting with the audience (evaluation: so what?). Orientation clauses may be placed strategically anywhere in the narrative to function as evaluation, enticing some reaction from the audience and offering new platforms for identity construction for the storyteller (Labov, 1972: 366). Such orientation/evaluation clauses may support the narrator’s context-driven agency construction, especially in intergenerational memory narratives. Sharing intergenerational memories as part of autobiographical memories requires that the storyteller strictly controls possible interpretations. Evaluation is an available narrative tool to set the importance of events and state the protagonist’s assumed point of view (Labov, 1997; Polanyi, 1989). An evaluation may take many different linguistic forms that effectively complete the event sequence (Polanyi, 1989) and follow up on it by adjusting and connecting retrieved and reconstructed experiences to the storytelling context by guiding the audience on possible readings of the story (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2012). Thus, evaluation broadens the revoiced personal experience to ensure tellability and memorability by letting the narrator underpin the story’s relevance and relatability for digital collective memory archives.

StoryCorps as narrative data

StoryCorps is a digital collective memory site that is not tied to a single theme but represents accounts of life events ranging from traumas to day-to-day experiences. For accessibility reasons, I worked with digitally mediated autobiographical narratives published on its website: StoryCorps.org. StoryCorps’ built-in search engine allows for keyword search only, so I browsed the data manually for the presence of intergenerational memories in the stories. Since my initial investigation showed that the term “intergenerational memory” does not appear in the database, I established terminological subcategories of intergenerational memory narratives from the definitions of the concept. I applied these terms as manual search codes, including “grandparent,” “grandmother,” “grandfather,” “parent,” “mother,” “father,” “ancestor,” “uncle,” “aunt,” “immigration,” “settle,” “Holocaust,” “slavery,” and “war.” Some of these concepts refer to traumatic events, often, but not always, the topic of intergenerational memory narratives. I applied these codes to search the stories, excluding the blogs or other forms of using the narratives. Most narratives, however, contained the search terms not as intergenerational memories but as conversational partners’ autobiographical memories. The final screening meant listening to 20 narratives with the search terms, which I narrowed to the stories in which intergenerational memory is less fragmented. The qualitative nature of the study makes it possible to see the narrative structuring of intergenerational memories and their role in constructing/enhancing tellability and memorability in such a small sample.

All four selected narratives focus on retelling how traumatic events affected storytellers’ ancestors, which is often the purpose of intergenerational memory telling. The narrative structure pinpoints how storytellers incorporate a contextualized understanding of these inherited traumas into their autobiographical memories. Concerning their narrative form, in two memories, a single narrator tells a chronological event series of their past, and two are conversational interaction-based stories in which the two partners reminisce together, relying on each other’s contributions. I used the official recording on the website for the narrative and discourse analysis, changing the digitally mastered transcript only where the voice recording was different. Here, I provide a summary of the four stories.

Narrative analysis of tellability and memorability constructed by ancestral memories

“Sylvia’s Legacy” concatenates two themes and two distinct storyworld contexts with two protagonists separated by three generations into one memory event with agency versus a sense of victimhood as the turning point at its center. The first story unfolds in a series of orientations and evaluations about Ellaraino’s visit to Louisiana at her parents’ decision. At this point, Sylvia represents a bygone historical era far from Ellaraino’s urban teenage environment; her life and stories seem sentimental and irrelevant to a teenager at first sight. The relatable, thus, tellable conflict is the generation gap, which Ellaraino translates into a Labovian evaluation at the beginning of her telling, “I just did not want to be spending my time with a senile, old woman” (Ellaraino, 2011). An embedded orientation about the final part of her journey to Louisiana expresses the generational time travel. She concludes with another evaluation stating that Sylvia was “slender . . . almost frail frame . . . [b]ut . . . regal-looking.” Moreover, Sylvia is an engaging storyteller capable of involving a 16-year-old teenager in the meaningful reconstruction of her life experiences. The turning point in Ellaraino’s autobiographical memory lies within the evaluation constructed in retrospect as a symbolic journey toward self-understanding by choosing to learn to listen.

The second theme is American slavery, which created and maintained multi-generationally detrimental vicitimicy in how formerly enslaved individuals defined their needs and abilities regarding literacy and education. The narrative reaches its climax with the intergenerational memory episode when Ellaraino recalls how Sylvia had gained literacy because she had realized how illiteracy had deprived her of the possibility to grow. “[N]ot knowing how to read and write made her feel like a jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces missing” (Ellaraino, 2011). While Sylvia learned literacy, Ellaraino learns to read and understand Sylvia’s memory as the backbone of her identity as agency against a socially composed state of victimicy. While evaluation and orientation are passive clauses, in this case, they focus on the perceived interaction between the storyteller and listener, guiding possible interpretations and preventing misinterpretations.

By telling her memory, Ellaraino constructs her agency-based identity both at the moment of storytelling, when she understands the power of her inherited memory about slavery, and, in retrospect, as a teenager willing to listen and reconsider her beliefs based on what she heard. Retelling her great-grandmother’s agentive self as someone ready to learn and ask for help to improve and develop means that she understands the strength constructed narratively by rejecting victimhood. The story’s theme is highly tellable and memorable on both levels. On one hand, the gap created by a misunderstanding between the older and the younger generations is always noteworthy regardless of the historical age. Ellaraino’s evaluation of her anticipation of the summer as a 16-year-old teenager is not self-aggrandizing; on the other hand, it is self-belittling: how she thought an older woman could not be part of her life. It refers to the generation gap discussed earlier and how what came later refused all her stereotypical expectations. Moreover, the story justifies the collective memory construction work of StoryCorps’ philosophy about learning to listen. The tellability of Sylvia’s life as a formerly enslaved person is rooted in slavery as an intergenerational collective and individual trauma that Sylvia resists in her agency construction. The narrative transition from acquired victimicy to consciously chosen agency makes the story memorable in the StoryCorps archive.

“She said even though she had freedom, not knowing how to read and write made her feel like a jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces missing” (Ellaraino, 2011). Using reported speech and the “jigsaw puzzle” metaphor with missing pieces are Ellaraino’s narrative discursive strategies to mark the turning point. Literacy is more than the mechanical ability to decipher or produce a written version of information. As a rule-governed interpretation form, it grants access to the facts, contexts, and feelings, occasionally foregrounding the writer’s position. Literacy encodes personal experiences and elevates them from the potential oblivion of the family or local community to preservation in various archives and databases. It may give narratives wide publicity if the narrator wishes to do so. The “missing pieces” in Sylvia’s jigsaw puzzle life refer precisely to the yet-unknown potential of accessing information about others or the channels of disseminating her own knowledge. Sylvia understood this potential as power, and age did not stop her from empowering herself through gaining literacy. Ellaraino’s fascination is rooted in the peculiarity of her great-grandmother’s action toward achieving vital literacy. The fact that regardless of her age, she is ready to bring change into her life and accept help is something by which we tend to feel weakened. While this part has many references to past complicating actions, none are explicitly stated as such; they are translated into orientations or evaluations. In doing so, Ellaraino focuses on an imagined audience and how they could and should relate to the narrative. Presenting complicated actions as orientation clauses can broaden the story’s tellability, relatability, and memorability. The passage closes with a complicating action referring to telling intergenerational memory: “And at night, she would tell her stories” (Ellaraino, 2011).

Reported speech syntax is one powerful way to connect the narrator’s context (the storytelling world) with the ancestor’s (the storyworld). Intergenerational memory retellings contain sketchy and fragmented event sequences that concatenate into a unified form of self-concept two temporarily and spatially distinct sets of voices emerging from diverse reporting contexts. The voices remain independent, while at the same time, they interact with each other to make meaning. Using reported speech represents one of the most appropriate discourse forms to highlight heavily contextualized roles and relationships of voices in intergenerational memories. Tannen (1989: 112) suggests that in conversation analysis, the term “constructed dialogue” be used instead of the more general syntax term, reported speech because an utterance as said in one context can never be repeated in precisely the exact words even if it is perfectly “reported.” Even more pertinent to intergenerational memory narratives in Tannen’s (1989: 112) approach is her observation that “in many, perhaps most, cases, however, material represented as dialogue was never spoken by anyone else in a form resembling that constructed, if at all.” The reporting context that once facilitated the narrative is taken across generations to storytellers with varied interests and habits of keeping and telling these memories. Constructed dialogue is an essential device in intergenerational memory narratives due to its potential to open already closed and, in some cases, partially forgotten conversations to construct identities by casting memories and their protagonists into new contexts. Reconfiguring statements attributed to one’s ancestors may take at least two structurally distinct forms: the “constructed direct quote” and the “gist utterance.” The former is a statement or series of statements the narrator composes to sound like they quoted the ancestor. The latter reads as the assumed summary of the ancestors’ imagined words. Both are crucial narrative moves to ensure memorability by invoking the ancestor.

With few actual complicating actions, constructed dialogue becomes central to expressing vulnerability, agency, and generational communication dynamics in Ellaraino’s account of Sylvia’s journey to literacy. “She said even though she had freedom, not knowing how to read and write made her feel like a jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces missing. And when she was 85 years old, she said it stops there” (Ellaraino, 2011). The central metaphor is understanding her life as incomplete, conceptualized in the jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces, about how freedom is only complete when one is literate and can access information to make choices. The phrasing is a “gist utterance,” which paraphrases the bottom line of what could have initially been said in the conversation, embedding it into the new storytelling context. The metaphor orients the listener. It explains why Sylvia would act upon her lack of knowledge, reconstructing her victimicy into an agency where she could make her choices. Freedom cannot be fully realized with pieces of half-truths gained by hearsay or others’ interpretations. It is feasible only through free will to acquire the skills she needs to live a whole life. The constructed dialogue breaks the monotony and unidirectional nature of storytelling by invoking the voice of the other. Doing so changes the narrative’s dynamic and creates a safe platform to lay bare evaluative statements. The proof of Sylvia’s literacy is the tattered church fan on which she had printed her name, signifying her triumph over the darkness of intellectual vulnerability when secondhand information due to illiteracy tethers one’s freedom.

Similar patterns of constructed dialogue and restructured narrative syntax signify tellability and agency construction in Helen Merrill’s narrative about her mother’s voting despite her illness with the Spanish flu (Merrill and Hartley, 2020). The narrative is linear, lacking vague references or trauma-infused meanders that could take the listener off-track. Merrill interweaves her intergenerational memories about her mother’s life before her birth into a chronologically linear narrative structure whose clarity and structural balance hint that the narrative circulated in her family, being told multiple times. A series of orientation clauses about the mother’s severe condition and the doctor’s arrival introduces the dialogue scenes, “Mom was apparently in a coma because she could hear everything said, but she couldn’t respond or move anything” (Merrill and Hartley, 2020). Intergenerational memory content unfolds from a constructed dialogue between Merrill’s father and the doctor who did not believe in his patient’s recovery. In the passage retold as a [re]constructed dialogue, Merrill alternates both types of utterances to underpin the seriousness of her mother’s condition. “So, he said, I’m going to fill out the death certificate and leave it on the table, but I’m not going to sign it, and I’m not going to put in the time of death” (Merrill and Hartley, 2020). A constructed direct quote here re-enlivens the scene with the doctor’s desperation to cope with death and his frustration over his incapacity to help even though nobody has blamed him. Helen invokes the doctor to express her mother’s life-threatening condition, indicating that her very existence depended on her mother’s recovery. Intergenerational memories often bring the existential “what if” question to the story’s center, constructing memorability. Quoting the doctor authenticates the condition with existential doubts. The last sentence is a gist utterance, “And when the doctor came back the next day and saw that she was alive, he couldn’t believe it” (Merrill and Hartley, 2020). The constructed dialogue ensures tellability by underpinning the complex interdependent agency of both the ancestor and the descendant. The mother’s survival of her critical condition is miraculous; Helen summarizes the doctor’s astonishment by implying the dialogue that may have occurred.

Constructed dialogue is a powerful discursive tool to reveal a complex belief system that shapes the self. The third part of Helen’s narrative fast-forwards the events to the recovery phase with the 1920 November elections near. The passage revokes the parents’ remembered/re-imagined discourse, in which the mother firmly stated that she was going to vote. Helen re-enacts her parents’ argument through constructed direct quotes, including her father’s concern about his wife’s fragile health and her mother’s wish to vote as a concern for the future she wanted to live and see. The words activate the drama scenario in a simplified form to strengthen the sick mother’s agency in wanting to be part of the future by taking responsibility for it. Helen animates the parents’ voices in the story somewhat exaggeratedly to point out the source of her inherited patriotism and identity as a responsible citizen. De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2012) state that storytellers report someone else’s speech to activate multiple interactive meaning-making contexts of a given narrative. In the case of intergenerational memory, the narrators are located in a storytelling world. They invoke two storyworlds: one that contains their ancestors’ life stories and the second that situates their own memories. They can shift among the three storyworlds, opening the once-closed event sequences for reinterpretation, often in reported speech. Constructed dialogues can function as evaluative devices and “can contribute to the creation of a certain self-image of the teller” (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2012: 169). The 2020 November elections in which Helen plans to vote construe her storyworld from which she reinterprets her mother’s determination to vote despite her health condition. A series of complicating actions signal the conclusion, where verbs in the simple past tense refer to the closed, factual, and unchangeable nature of actions. Retelling the story is an agency source for Helen Merrill and her granddaughter, as she explains that “to [her, voting is] almost a sacred thing” (Merrill and Hartley, 2020). Thus, Merrill connects the storyworld, the storytelling world, and the imagined audience implied by StoryCorps’ digital archive, making her story tellable and memorable.

Margot and Susan Moinester apply conversational storytelling to reminisce about Susan’s parents’ memories of their survival in the Holocaust (Moinester and Moinester, 2023). In a conversational narrative, the plot emerges in an interaction where interlocutors tell stories with each other rather than to someone else (Ochs and Capps, 2001). Its contextual integration into local discourse allows for negotiating meaning (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2012). Personal conversational narratives use language to translate life events into a coherent event sequence by arranging them into a temporal and logical order “across the past, present, and as yet unrealized experience” (Ochs and Capps, 2001: 2–3). Thus, these stories lack a fixed narrative configuration but construct knowledge continuously rather than accessing it from preexisting polished narrative performances. Interactivity implies shared responsibility for the content, the structural-discursive features, and the performativity of the narrative, where the conversational partners jointly control meaning making. The narrative construction of the dynamic interaction-based storyline emphasizes that the experience is transmissible and worth remembering. As the StoryCorps version of the Moinesters’ talk reveals, the joint discursive control of owning and revoicing intergenerational memories is a way to adjust their story to an unknown, imagined audience of the digitally archived and publicly accessible story collection. The previously thought-out, somewhat scripted conversational narratives become authentic talk-in-interaction because of the narrative features they apply to enhance long-term connection with an imagined future audience of the archives, the broader public in time, that the two conversational partners have in mind at the time of the recording.

To her daughter’s question, “What was it like being raised by two survivors?” Susan Moinester responds with a summative evaluation clause placed as orientation, “It was an embarrassment to be a survivor or the child of a survivor” (Moinester and Moinester, 2023). The semantics of “embarrassment” is complex as it implies the realms of physical and mental, such as anxious self-consciousness, impaired body functions (in this case, self-construction), confusion or disturbance of the mind, and overall difficulty in functioning. The position of the word in the answer makes its narrative function identity construction. At the same time, it modifies the subsequent phrase, “to be a survivor,” which refers to someone who at least continues to carry on at full capacity or even prosper. Susan’s evaluation of her own experience is framed as an oxymoron, the two keywords having oppositional meanings to create a new meaning. It is also noteworthy that while the question concerns her own memories, Susan first reflects on her parents’ life by saying “embarrassment to be a survivor” and adds her experience only afterward “or the child of a survivor.” The conjunction “or” points to embarrassment as inherited from her parents’ experience of the Holocaust survivors’ socio-culturally constructed mindset rather than something she personally had. Yet the same conjunction constructs Susan’s embarrassment linguistically and personally by the creative power of language. Such delicately framed discursive self-inclusion in intergenerational memory is a frequently occurring form claiming that while actual experiences belong to them, the self, “who I am,” is defined by them. Her parents’ and her own embarrassment are rooted in the collectively induced silence about the parents’ traumatic experience. Learning to speak about it means emerging from the socio-cultural embeddedness of silence as normative behavior. The intergenerational memory concentrated in an oxymoron becomes a key narrative feature in tellability construction as it expresses agency gained by wanting to speak about the experience regardless of how traumatic, painful, or controversial it is. Describing a survivor’s and the descendant’s experience as embarrassment pinpoints the break necessary for public memory construction, which must stay noteworthy and memorable across time. The conversational framework enables the revoicing already known and repeated intergenerational memories as dynamically emerging complex evaluations of the impact of the traumatic past.

Constructed dialogue and code-switching indicate the strategic location of narrative evaluation in the unfolding intergenerational memories in the conversational storytelling of Martha Escutia and Marina Jimenez about their grandfather’s life (Escutia and Jimenez, 2020). The StoryCorps excerpt begins with the two women taking turns describing Ricardo Ovilla arriving in the United States under the Bracero Program. The story’s meaning unfolds against the historical and contemporary macro-social contexts of racism, which is the principle StoryCorps uses to frame the narrative’s broadcasting. Escutia and Jimenez revoice their intergenerational memories about their grandfather’s experiences with institutional racism, which he suffered despite the set of legal protocols intended to protect Braceros from discrimination and poor wages. “When he came here as a Bracero, he had to take these showers with some kind of disinfectant. But he would say, ‘Oh, you know, they disinfected me to make sure I didn’t have the lice. Los piojos.’ The head lice! So, to him, it was just a joke.” Jimenez adds the coda to the conversational story a few lines later, “My grandfather hid those ugly memories” (Escutia and Jimenez, 2020).

Escutia frames the story as a constructed direct quote to invoke her grandfather’s words regarding his choice to hide his suffering and humiliation caused by institutionalized and later de facto racism behind the humor of the grotesque. The use of the Spanish term for head lice constructs meaning in two ways. First, it points to the fact that Orvilla had limited English, preventing him from protecting himself against racism and subsequent false accusations. His joking about being publicly humiliated is a false self-protective measure against traumatic experiences that his granddaughters expand and evaluate by intrasentential code-switching. This conversational move also points to Jimenez and Escutia’s position about American society’s historical fear of immigrants bringing unwanted pathogenic agents. With the belated evaluation to understand their grandfather’s story, Jimenez and Escutia express their understanding of the humiliation and victimization their grandfather could not say out loud. The public recognition of trauma becomes a source of agency by addressing the collective trauma-induced behavior of both victim and perpetrator. The constructed dialogues with the code-switching ensure the joint control of meaning making as dynamic, personal, relatable, and, most importantly, tellable and memorable. Using such re-imagined dialogues, the narrators reinterpret their intergenerational memory from the social perspective of racism to pinpoint its impact on individual lives.

Conclusion

In the present contribution, I sought to study how telling intergenerational memory episodes facilitates the narrative tellability and memorability of autobiographical memories on StoryCorps, a digital memory-sharing platform and archive. I analyzed four individual autobiographical memories with intergenerational memory episodes from the StoryCorps database to gain a deeper understanding of the following issues: (1) StoryCorps’ changing role as a digital archive in memory sharing; (2) the narrative tools that secure long-term tellability and memorability within digitally mediated memory telling; and (3) the social-cultural implications of telling intergenerational memories within autobiographical memory narratives.

Because StoryCorps is not a single-theme memory archive but a dynamically evolving complex system of digitally collected and stored autobiographical memories, the focus of collective memory shifts from theme to the process of telling and sharing memories. For the participants, being part of this digitally mediated collective memory means constructing their identity by sharing, telling, and learning by listening. Storytelling becomes a form of literacy. Memories connect narratives and narrators, and StoryCorps frames the process of remembering rather than defining its content. By mediating recorded memories, StoryCorps creates interactions between the stories and prompts more storytelling.

The study shows that the specific narrative tools building tellability are the victimicy-to-agency storyline within the content, the centrality of evaluation among the narrative clauses, and the use of reported speech as constructed dialogue to defy chronology as a mode for collective remembering. The stories express the lingering sense of loss and use narrative tools to reconcile the contradictory relationship between how important and challenging it is to tell and reenact intergenerational memories. In telling inherited memories, the storyteller uses evaluation at various points of the narrative, including the very beginning, to negotiate and control the meaning making process. Narrators do so to continue interacting with imagined audiences over time and in multiple settings.

In the context of StoryCorps, the social-cultural implications of telling intergenerational memories as part of autobiography are twofold. First, intergenerational memories are told to justify the storyteller’s existence and cultural position over time. Storytelling becomes a source of agency and a cultural responsibility; it is an obligation to remember. Intergenerational memory narratives are told as the descendants want to remember and justify their agency in understanding the past and how it affects their present lives. Intergenerational memory retellings lack the richness and detail of personal memories. However, they narratively reconstruct fragmented information to answer existential dilemmas and justify identity construction by ideological alignment. Second, the fact that certain memories have been passed down in families marks the memorability of these experiences. Tellability and memorability connect along the logic that what is worth telling is worth remembering. Thus, the narrative tools that ensure tellability and memorability simultaneously protect the integrity of the storytellers and arouse and keep the interest of StoryCorps’s undefined, imagined audience.