How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

While some critics have derided the late-20th century explosion of memoir as exhibitionistic and self-aggrandizing, literary theorists are looking seriously at the profusion and success of autobiographical literature. This work traces the forces that shape identity and then confronts the complex problems that arise when we write about who we think we are. Using life writings as examples - including works by Christa Wolf, Art Spiegelman, Oliver Sacks, Henry Louis Gates, Melanie Thernstrom and Philip Roth - Paul John Eakin draws on research in neurology, cognitive science, memory studies, developmental psychology and related fields to rethink the very nature of self-representation. After showing how the experience of living in one’s body shapes one’s identity, he explores relational and narrative modes of being, emphasizing social sources of identity, and demonstrating that the self and the story of the self are constantly evolving in relation to others. Eakin concludes by engaging the ethical issues raised by the conflict between the authorial impulse to life writing and a traditional, privacy-based ethics that such writings often violate.