King opens Chapter 1 the same way he opens all others except the Afterwords. He writes, “There is a story I know. It’s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle” (1). He explains that every time the story is told it changes slightly, but the fundamental aspects of the story never change. For example, “The world never leaves the turtle’s back. And the turtle never swims away” (1). He continues the story by explaining that the turtle is atop another turtle which is atop another turtle and so on (1). In response to a young girl’s question about how many turtles there are, the storyteller admits to not knowing but that “it’s all the way down” (2).

King then states (as he will throughout the text) that “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (2). He goes on to recount stories about his mother and father. His mother took a job with Boeing in 1963 and found that she was discriminated against because she was a woman, while his father abandoned the family. King’s brother was eventually contacted by their father’s new family after their father had passed.