(Un)exceptional Stories

Abstract

They say that in interview-based research, the moment you begin to hear the same ready-made turns of phrase, the same familiar building blocks, the same well-worn plots, you have come full circle—you may stop; further conversations will no longer carry the research forward. And yet there are places where, even when the patterns surface early, I feel an irresistible pull to listen for more. One more childhood. One more love. One more working life. The chronicle of calloused hands. The habitual apology—“but there’s nothing exceptional in my story.” For what, after all, does “exceptional” mean? Something strikingly bright: a gift, a talent run to an extreme, a singular capacity. Or else the one who does not quite belong—who jars against the grain, who stands out from whatever we happen to call ordinary. But “ordinary” is a matter of distance and comparison. And so, too, the “exceptional” shifts with where you stand, and when. This brief piece offers up a handful of exceptions—shards of memory, small episodes, stories—bestowed on me by my interlocutors over nearly two decades of work.