{"product_id":"how-our-lives-become-stories-making-selves-9780801485985","title":"How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe popularity of such books as Frank McCourts Angelas Ashes  Mary Karrs The Liars Club  and Kathryn Harrisons controversial The Kiss  has led columnists to call ours \"the age of memoir.\" And while some critics have derided the explosion of memoir as exhibitionistic and self-aggrandizing  literary theorists are now beginning to look seriously at this profusion of autobiographical literature. Informed by literary  scientific  and experiential concerns  How Our Lives Become Stories enhances knowledge of the complex forces that shape identity  and confronts the equally complex problems that arise when we write about who we think we are. Using life writings as examplesincluding works by Christa Wolf  Art Spiegelman  Oliver Sacks  Henry Louis Gates  Melanie Thernstrom  and Philip RothPaul John Eakin draws on the latest 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 ones body shapes ones 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67896604033077,"sku":"ByrdShop_0801485983","price":30.6,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780801485985.jpg?v=1793777891","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/how-our-lives-become-stories-making-selves-9780801485985","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}