How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (review)

Abstract

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. "Self and self-experience [. . .] are not given, monolithic, and invariant, but dynamic, changing, and plural." The traditional model of "life writing," Eakin claims, assumed a self-determined, autonomous self. Now, under the influence of cognitive and social psychologists, clinicians, and others, this model is slowly fading. Much contemporary biography and autobiography reflects a more flexible conception of self.