JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert.

JAD: And this is Radiolab. And today ...

ROBERT: We're looking back. Back in time.

JAD: Yeah, we started with the mystery of Ötzi the Iceman.

ROBERT: That's a 5,000-year-old story, right?
JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: With murder, frozen mummy, arrowhead.

JAD: Et cetera. And then we went two-and-a-half-million years back, so farther back still, to the mystery of the Taung child and the little skull.

ROBERT: Now, a huge leap. We go from 2.5 million years ago to something like 14 billion years ago.

JAD: Yeah, this is the very oldest thing in the universe.

ROBERT: It is really probably the oldest we can tell. It is a history ...

JAD: Of everything.

ROBERT: Yeah. And we're gonna start with ...

JAD: Uh, hello, hello, hello.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Hi!

JAD: Hi. Is this Jenny, by any chance?

JENNY HOLLOWELL: It sure is.

JAD: Her name's Jenny Hollowell. She's a writer, an author. And here's the set-up: so we were recently asked by the show Selected Shorts to curate an evening of stories. Just to select a couple for people to read. Well, that turned out to be really hard for us. Like, we—we could not agree. We argued, it got kinda ugly internally—I'm not gonna go there, but the one story that we all agreed on instantly ...

ROBERT: And it—and we never really looked back.

JAD: Yeah. Was a story from Jenny Hollowell called "A History of Everything, Including You." So we called her up, and we asked her to ...

ROBERT: Well, I kinda gushed a little first.

JAD: Oh, yeah. [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: There was the fawning.

ROBERT: There was the fawning.

ROBERT: I mean, I know that people are gonna hear this, so they're not gonna read it so they won't be able to dwell on just the incredible tensions in these very short and specific sentences that you've written, but I'm just wondering: how long did this—it's about five pages to hold in your hand, how many decades did it take for you to write this?

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Well, it's—it's one of those stories that defies most of my experiences with writing stories, which is that it came out very quickly. And I always hate hearing other writers say how quickly something came about, because it's a rare occurrence and you're always kind of full of—of envy for those moments. This is the, you know, one story that I think I've ever written in a day.

JAD: Really? Wow!

JENNY HOLLOWELL: But then, you know ...

ROBERT: Oh, that's just not fair!

JENNY HOLLOWELL: [laughs]

JAD: Would you mind reading it for us? And we can talk more on the back end?

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Okay, sure. A History of Everything, Including You.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: First there was god, or gods or nothing. Then synthesis, space, the expanse, explosions, implosions, particles, objects, combustion and fusion. Out of the chaos came order, stars were born and shone and died. Planets rolled across their galaxies on invisible ellipses and the elements combined and became.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Life evolved or was created. Cells trembled and divided and gasped and found dry land. Soon they grew legs and fins and hands and antennae and mouths and ears and wings and eyes. Eyes that opened wide to take all of it in, the creeping, growing, soaring, swimming, crawling, stampeding universe.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Eyes opened and closed and opened again, we called it blinking. Above us shone a star that we called the sun. And we called the ground the earth. So we named everything—including ourselves. We were man and woman and when we got lonely we figured out a way to make more of us. We called it sex, and most people enjoyed it. We fell in love. We talked about god and banged stones together, made sparks and called them fire, we got warmer and the food got better.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: We got married, we had some children, they cried, and crawled, and grew. One dissected flowers, sometimes eating the petals. Another liked to chase squirrels. We fought wars over money, and honor, and women. We starved ourselves, we hired prostitutes, we purified our water. We compromised, decorated, and became esoteric. One of us stopped breathing and turned blue. Then others. First we covered them with leaves, and then we buried them in the ground. We remembered them. We forgot them. We aged.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Our buildings kept getting taller. We hired lawyers and formed councils and left paper trails, we negotiated, we admitted, we got sick and searched for cures. We invented lipstick, vaccines, Pilates, solar panels, interventions, table manners, firearms, window treatments, therapy, birth control, tailgating, status symbols, palimony, sportsmanship, focus groups, Zoloft, sunscreen, landscaping, Cessnas, fortune cookies, chemotherapy, convenience foods and computers. We angered militants, and our mothers.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: You were born. You learned to walk, and went to school, and played sports, and lost your virginity, and got into a decent college, and majored in psychology, and went to rock shows, and became political, and got drunk, and changed your major to marketing, and wore turtleneck sweaters, and read novels, and volunteered, and went to movies, and developed a taste for blue cheese dressing.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: I met you through friends, and didn’t like you at first. The feeling was mutual, but we got used to each other. We had sex for the first time behind an art gallery, standing up and slightly drunk. You held my face in your hands and said that I was beautiful. And you were too. Tall with a streetlight behind you. We went back to your place and listened to the White Album. We ordered in. We fought and made up and got good jobs and got married and bought an apartment and worked out and ate more and talked less. I got depressed. You ignored me. I was sick of you. You drank too much and got careless with money. I slept with my boss. We went into counseling and got a dog. I bought a book of sex positions and we tried the least degrading one, the wheelbarrow. You took flight lessons and subscribed to Rolling Stone. I learned Spanish and started gardening.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: We had some children who more or less disappointed us but it might have been our fault. You were too indulgent and I was too critical. We loved them anyway. One of them died before we did, stabbed on the subway. We grieved. We moved. We adopted a cat. The world seemed uncertain, we lived beyond our means. I got judgmental and belligerent, you got confused and easily tired. You ignored me, I was sick of you. We forgave. We remembered. We made cocktails. We got tender. There was that time on the porch when you said, "Can you believe it?"

JENNY HOLLOWELL: This was near the end and your hands were trembling. I think you were talking about everything, including us. Did you want me to say it, so it would not be lost? It was too much for me to think about. I could not go back to the beginning. I said, "Not really." And we watched the sun go down. A dog kept barking in the distance, and you were tired but you smiled and you said, "Hear that? It's rough, rough." And we laughed. You were like that.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Now your question is my project and our house is full of clues. I'm reading old letters and turning over rocks. I bury my face in your sweaters. I study a photograph taken at the beach, the sun in our eyes, and the water behind us. It's a victory to remember the forgotten picnic basket and your striped beach blanket. It's a victory to remember how the jellyfish stung you and you ran screaming from the water. It's a victory to remember dressing the wound with meat tenderizer, and you saying I made it better. I will tell you this: standing on our hill this morning, I looked at the land we chose for ourselves, I saw a few green patches, and our sweet little shed. That same dog was barking, a storm was moving in. I did not think of heaven, but I saw that the clouds were beautiful and I watched them cover the sun.

ROBERT: A History of Everything, Including You by Jenny Hollowell.

JAD: Jenny, can you talk a little bit about, like, where—what you were thinking when you were writing this? Like, where'd this come from?

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Oh, I—well, I—the story kind of came from that—that impulse to kind of trace—trace back. I think maybe I was in therapy at the time. [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JENNY HOLLOWELL: And, you know, they always ask you about your parents or their parents, and I found myself a little frustrated by the idea that it's—it's traceable. Like, whatever sort of position you find yourself in life, that you can trace back to the origin. You know, if you follow that logic, then you're eventually gonna end up in a, you know, a protoplasmic sort of situation.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JENNY HOLLOWELL: And I think that ...

ROBERT: 'Cause on the couch the guy said, "So tell me about your parents. Tell me about their parents. Tell me about their parents. Tell me about their parents." It's one of those kind of things?

JAD: [laughs]

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Kind of. At some point you're talking about some caveman's emotionally-unavailable parents.

JAD: Hmm. And to imagine one of the conversations you might have had with your therapist, I know you were once very religious and then you've kind of lost your faith. I mean, was that part of this? Did that happen near or in the neighborhood of writing this story?

JENNY HOLLOWELL: It was probably about two years before the writing of the story, but it was very—it was still a very fresh experience. I was sort of in the thick of it at the time.

JAD: And was there something of that struggle or fall from faith that kind of got infused into the storytelling?

JENNY HOLLOWELL: I think so, too. I mean, I think that definitely is a part of, you know, the searching that I was going through at the time, just that desire to grasp what might be the grand, you know, heart of it all. So the story was a little about that wrestling experience, trying to explain how I'm here, how we got here, how we ended up in this moment.

ROBERT: And the logic of that is having lost a narr—a given-to-you narrative of how things began, you were thinking, "Okay, so let me see if I can work my own narrative from the ground up?"

JENNY HOLLOWELL: That's—that's definitely where I was, just sort of maybe mourning the loss of that narrative a little bit.

JAD: Huh.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: And making one of my own to just give something to—to think about. I definitely don't feel like I stumbled across any solutions, but I felt the comfort of narrative is definitely something I believe in, and the story sort of is an extension of my process about thinking about the beginning of everything.

ROBERT: Well, as creation stories go, it's really, really nice.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: I have to say. You're gonna—you know, you're gonna be hearing from Talmudic rabbis and Koranic scholars and Christian saints.

JAD: Have you ever thought about getting a church? Starting one up?

ROBERT: Yeah, a church. Start one of your own.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: [laughs] Wow. That's—that feels like a can of worms that ... [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JENNY HOLLOWELL: But thank you!

[LISTENER: Hi. This is Amanda calling from Syracuse, New York. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Brenna Farrell, Ellen Horne, David Gebel, Dylan Keefe, Matt Kielty, Lynn Levy, Andy Mills, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Kelsey Padgett, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster, Soren Wheeler and Jamie York. With help from Damiano Marchetti, Molly McBridge-Jacobson and Alexandra Leigh Young.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Garrett Ward from Los Angeles. Our fact-checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris. Thank you!]

[LISTENER: Thanks so much! Bye!]

-30-

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.

Unlock member-only exclusives and support the show

Exclusive Podcast Extras

Entire Podcast Archive

Listen Ad-Free

Behind-the-Scenes Content

Video Extras

Original Music & Playlists

Unlock exclusives in The Lab

Sign up for the newsletter