Taking their lives public

Carrie Cook was a senior producer at ABC News who, she says, “spent my life hearing people’s stories in the TV medium, and I know truth can be more powerful than fiction.” That experience led her to come up with a multimedia idea that merged books, TV and the “American Idol” voting experience. The result is “The Story of My Life,” a collaboration between “Good Morning America” and Simon & Schuster that allows the American public to choose a memoir they want to read in book form.

“Nothing has ever been done like this before,” says Ryan Harbage, an editor for S&S; subsidiary Simon Spotlight Entertainment. “No one has gone out to the American public and said, ‘We want to hear your stories.’ It creates a true level playing field, where anyone has a shot at finding a publisher and an audience.”

The concept is simple enough. On the Nov. 19 edition of “GMA,” viewers were invited to submit 600-word essays about their lives. Entries were accepted until Dec. 17. Cook and several writer friends culled the best 50 from the more than 6,000 submissions, then knocked that number down to 15. Those 15 were then whittled down to three finalists by a panel of judges that included authors Mary Higgins Clark, Mary Karr and James McBride.

The finalists underwent ABC background checks to ensure the veracity of their tales. Next, they were paired with published authors (whose names have not been released) who helped turn their stories into full-length manuscripts. Segments on the finalists will air on “GMA” next week, after which the public will be invited to vote on a winner. On April 22, the victor will be announced on “GMA” and profiled that evening on ABC’s “20/20.” Simultaneously, 175,000 copies of the winner’s memoir will hit the nation’s bookstores.

“You wouldn’t believe the stuff I got,” Cook says, with a laugh, about the thousands of submissions she waded through. “They were supposed to be 600 words, but most people didn’t listen. I got boxes of recipes, depositions from trials” and an enormous amount of material that Cook admits simply wasn’t that interesting.

“Everyone’s story has merit,” she says. “But to be able to hold its own to a national TV audience and to have the weight of Simon & Schuster behind it, that’s a narrower field.”

This means that Cook, the TV expert, was always consulting with the book people. As far as the final cut went, Harbage says they were looking for “stories that are inspiring, relatable and promotable. Experiences that everyone can relate to. Overcoming odds, adventure, things that tell the story of the human heart.”

The top 15 essays certainly filled that bill. There’s the tale of the African American fighter pilot who faces discrimination at home, then becomes one of the country’s top civil rights attorneys. The story of a housewife who learns her husband is a CIA operative, then becomes one herself. (That sound you hear is movie studios salivating over this one.) A woman who gives birth to 11 surrogate babies. And a teenage girl who develops a relationship with her incarcerated father after she sees him on TV fighting for prison reform.

“I think stories make us who we are,” says author Mary Karr (“The Liar’s Club”), who says she decided to become a judge of the 15 finalists because “it’s like reading the life stories of the 15 most interesting cab drivers in New York.”

Karr says a good tale must involve what she calls “complexity of self-understanding. You want somebody who knows something complicated and surprising about their own story.” In that respect, she says there were four essays that achieved that and essentially, the other judges agreed. “We didn’t argue,” she says. “There were two that everyone agreed upon. What that tells me is there is a level of quality that everyone recognized.”

Now the final three will be given a thumbs up or down by the viewing public, which makes “The Story of My Life,” in a certain sense, the world’s most literate reality show.

“Is it the ‘American Idol’ of publishing?” Harbage asks. “I think a lot of people might call it that, but the thing that’s most exciting about this is that it creates a real democratic process for publishing a book.”

Besides, says Cook, who is no longer at ABC, literary quality was not sacrificed to the god of making good TV. “At the end of the day, we chose the best story,” she says. “We’re proud of all three of the final manuscripts. I don’t feel the public can lose by any of these choices.”

Then, referring to “American Idol’s” most notorious loser, Cook adds: “We don’t have a William Hung in the mix.”