Telling a personal story live on stage was well outside Neil Gaiman's comfort zone. That's why he agreed to do it – and why he thinks cult storytellers The Moth are so important

I was given a list of things they wanted me to do at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. Everything seemed straightforward except for one thing. "What's The Moth?" I asked.

It was April 2007.

"The Moth's a storytelling thing," I was told. "You talk about things that happened to you, in front of a live audience." (There may have been other answers in history that were as technically correct, but missed out everything important, but offhand I cannot think what they are.) I agreed to tell a story.

It sounded outside my area of comfort, and as such, a wise thing to do. I didn't begin to understand what it was about until I turned up for the run-through beforehand, and I met Edgar Oliver. Edgar was one of the people telling stories that night in the sort of accent a stage-struck Transylvanian vampire might adopt in order to play Shakespeare. I watched him tell his story in the run-through and I knew I wanted to be part of this thing. I told my story (in it I was 15 and stranded alone at Liverpool Street Station, waiting for parents who would never come), and the audience listened and laughed and winced and clapped at the end, and I felt like I'd walked through fire and been embraced and loved. Without meaning to, I'd become part of the family. I subscribed to The Moth podcast, and every week somebody would tell me a true story that would, even if only slightly, change my life.

I've visited some of their story slams, as people who are randomly picked compete for audience love and respect; I've watched the stories they tell, and told my own stories there. I've watched people fail trying to tell stories, and I've watched them break the hearts of everyone in the room even as they inspired them.

The strange thing about these stories is that none of the tricks we use to gain love and respect work. The tales of how clever we were, how wise, how we won, mostly fail. The practised jokes and witty one-liners crash and burn. Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Having a place where the story starts and a place it's going is also important.

The Moth connects us because we all have stories. And the gulf that exists between us is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin colour, gender, race or attitudes, but we don't see the stories. And once we hear them we realise that the things dividing us are often illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are no thicker than scenery.

• Read Molly Ringwald on why she loves The Moth, plus true stories by Malcolm Gladwell, Nobel prize-winning geneticist Paul Nurse, Kimberly Reed, Kemp Powers and Elna Baker.

All the stories we feature appear in The Moth: This Is A True Story, edited by Catherine Burns, published by Serpent's Tail at £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39 with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.