Review: How to Tell a Story Everyone Wants to Hear (sometimes at your expense)
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 22, 2012
Lori Gertz is an accomplished media writer, loving mother, and grateful spouse who skillfully carries out two tasks in this double-edge book. I feel all the better off from this blending as I learned the detailed steps for initiating media coverage for a potentially explosive story while adroitly passing through shoals that can exist at the hand of voracious reporters and a craving public. Someday, this could very useful for me if I were to have a story the world wants to hear. But alas, I have not rescued myself from the clutches of a grizzly in Yellowstone nor discovered the cure for insomnia.Lori did and does have such a story. In the midst of a distinctive career and entrepreneurial achievements, in the delights of a happy marriage and successfully raising two children, an intrusion of almost unutterable description occurs in her home, bringing with it the terror of helplessness and a degrading descent into questions of self-worth. The intrusion is her and her husband's adopting an infant who, it turns out, is borne of an alcoholic mother, and also unknown to them, a child who suffers from a condition known as FASD. That's short for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, a malady of physical and mental permanent disorders that virtually renders the child incapable of living and surviving in any family we might choose to call normal.Lori and her husband, after unceasing anguish, decide to put the child up for adoption to a special couple trained and prepared, able to deal with the child's significant developmental and survival issues.The book then turns to advocacy issues since this condition is not an impairment known to the heart of society, and moral judgments are considered and debated in public, often heatedly, complete with finger-pointing and acrimony. At other times, cooler heads and sincere enquirers are engaged to seek solutions. But in any event, this has become a growing national consciousness with news reporters and feature editors all over it--occasionally with rapacious self-interest.Lori's gift is describing all this within the context of one's wanting the story to be told--but in the right way under trying but opportune circumstances that allow for public education and advocacy in dealing with a condition fairly common but not well known.Lori and her husband lived a lab and the book is a lab for learning how to tell a public story where you're the vital part of the experiment. This is a special and rare craft she's mastered. If you want to take it on, I can't imagine a better place to start than with this book.