How Our Lives Become Stories

In How Our Lives Become Stories, Paul John Eakin explains why he prefers 'to think of self less as an entity and more as a kind of awareness in process.'... Eakin makes the ethics of reading integral to his project.... Eakin attends to those who are repelled by the 'urge to confess' and he talks about telling all as a cultural imperative that may, for example, be costly to the families of memoirists despite the therapeutic value such confessions might have. The ethics of privacy, the fact of relational lives, and the moral strictures that shadow autobiographical tellings bring Eakin to ask, 'What is right and fair?'.

(Canadian Literature)

In this intriguing book, Paul John Eakin problematizes the notion of autobiography as 'the story of the self' and argues that in the act of narration one is engaged in a process of making a self.... How Our Lives Become Stories is a concise and engaging synopsis of the state of the art for anyone interested in the subject.

(Modern Fiction Studies)

This fascinating new book... offers an engaging introduction to identity and narrative.... This is a well-written, timely, and progressive book—a surprisingly rare mix.

(Virginia Quarterly Review)

When we write about our lives, the complex work of constructing the story is intertwined with all that constitutes the process of identity formation. In this book, Eakin expertly guides us through the thorny terrain of research in neurology, developmental psychology, and memory theory and revisits philosophy and literary theory. By the end of the journey, we have a far richer understanding of how individuals construct their lives and how they tell the story of that construction, as well as a sense of the dynamic interplay between the two processes.

(Literature and Medic