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Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative
Autobiography is naturally regarded as an art of retrospect, but making autobiography is equally part of the fabric of our ongoing experience. We tell the stories of our lives piecemeal, and these stories are not merely about our selves but also an integral part of them. In this way we "live autobiographically"; we have narrative identities. In this book, noted life-writing scholar Paul John Eakin explores the intimate, dynamic connection between our selves and our stories, between narrative and identity in everyday life. He draws on a wide range of autobiographical writings from work by Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, and André Aciman to the New York Times series "Portraits of Grief" memorializing the victims of 9/11, as well as the latest insights into identity formation from the fields of developmental psychology, cultural anthropology, and neurobiology. In his account, the self-fashioning in which we routinely, even automatically, engage is largely conditioned by social norms and biological necessities. We are taught by others how to say who we are, while at the same time our sense of self is shaped decisively by our lives in and as bodies. For Eakin, autobiography is always an act of self-determination, no matter what the circumstances, and he stresses its adaptive value as an art that helps to anchor our shifting selves in time.
184 pages, Hardcover
First published October 28, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 7, 2010
I wanted to like this more than I did. I thought it might help me write the introduction to a set of autobiographical essays that will soon, knock on wood, be published.
It is, on the one hand, an easy read -- a short book with clean clear sentences. And Eakin is an authority on the topic, having devoted his career to all things autobiography.
And while I learned a few things -- e.g. that we "write" autobiography as a continuous everyday experience, we write autobiography to write our future selves, to bury an archival bone that we anticipate digging up in the future, that autobiography must be based in the body -- I was put off by the maleness, the whiteness, and the eurocentricism of the language, form, and analysis.
While there are bows to how his analysis might not carry past first world culture, the bows were meant to bracket this issue. Fair enough, we cannot write about everything and I am willing to give the author his premises.
His form struck me as swaying from topic to topic too easily. The book, I thought, needs a serious editor who was willing to push Eakin into tightening his argument and presentation. But, I suspect his reputation disallowed this.
But the most serious weakness for me was lack of attention to the abrupt, discontinuity creating, hard kernels in life. For Eakin, the problem that autobiography solves is how to create a continuous self: he asks, who are we if we are changing all the time? What "I" is the arc that gives coherence to a lifetime of activity and change? In other words, difference and discontinuity is the problem to which the unity creating autobiography is the solution.
But I see it the other way around. The hard rock of the real is that around which the autobiographical narrative orbits. The narrative never seals, heals, or fixes the tear created by the hard kernel in our lives. Even given such a healing effort, the wound still erupts. In that sense, I suppose I start with the premise that like the macro life of the planet, our lives are riven. And I assume that they remain riven, remain torn, remain alienated.
In my counter-story, the point of autobiographical narratives is to know and to learn how to accept such riven-ness. Freedom appears, not as opposed to determinacy, but within determinacy's complete closure.
Healing then is not a soothing, a smoothing, a unifying activity. Rather, healing is our capacity to imbibe the poisonous world we receive/achieve and thereby decrease the doping effect of the lullabies we tell ourselves when we take in an opiate induced version of the real and the actual -- what in music we call schmaltz.
Writing autobiography has achieved its desired effect when what writes back to us is so powerful that, for the moment, we cannot cope with what we have written and read.
Well, at least he forced these words out of me. Thanks Eakin.
It is, on the one hand, an easy read -- a short book with clean clear sentences. And Eakin is an authority on the topic, having devoted his career to all things autobiography.
And while I learned a few things -- e.g. that we "write" autobiography as a continuous everyday experience, we write autobiography to write our future selves, to bury an archival bone that we anticipate digging up in the future, that autobiography must be based in the body -- I was put off by the maleness, the whiteness, and the eurocentricism of the language, form, and analysis.
While there are bows to how his analysis might not carry past first world culture, the bows were meant to bracket this issue. Fair enough, we cannot write about everything and I am willing to give the author his premises.
His form struck me as swaying from topic to topic too easily. The book, I thought, needs a serious editor who was willing to push Eakin into tightening his argument and presentation. But, I suspect his reputation disallowed this.
But the most serious weakness for me was lack of attention to the abrupt, discontinuity creating, hard kernels in life. For Eakin, the problem that autobiography solves is how to create a continuous self: he asks, who are we if we are changing all the time? What "I" is the arc that gives coherence to a lifetime of activity and change? In other words, difference and discontinuity is the problem to which the unity creating autobiography is the solution.
But I see it the other way around. The hard rock of the real is that around which the autobiographical narrative orbits. The narrative never seals, heals, or fixes the tear created by the hard kernel in our lives. Even given such a healing effort, the wound still erupts. In that sense, I suppose I start with the premise that like the macro life of the planet, our lives are riven. And I assume that they remain riven, remain torn, remain alienated.
In my counter-story, the point of autobiographical narratives is to know and to learn how to accept such riven-ness. Freedom appears, not as opposed to determinacy, but within determinacy's complete closure.
Healing then is not a soothing, a smoothing, a unifying activity. Rather, healing is our capacity to imbibe the poisonous world we receive/achieve and thereby decrease the doping effect of the lullabies we tell ourselves when we take in an opiate induced version of the real and the actual -- what in music we call schmaltz.
Writing autobiography has achieved its desired effect when what writes back to us is so powerful that, for the moment, we cannot cope with what we have written and read.
Well, at least he forced these words out of me. Thanks Eakin.
May 17, 2019
The scholarship on autobiography has been mostly a disappointment, mainly because it seems too invested in debating whether autobiography has a greater claim to truth than other genres. Obviously, autobiography requires a considerable amount of invention, from entire conversations down to obscure little details. However, when confronted by this fact, most authors immediately dismiss the idea that they are producing a historical text, with the most extreme version of this claim coming from Joan Didion's essay on her notebooks, where she claims the goal is to represent how the world felt at that moment. In this book, Eakin takes a stab at getting beyond these arguments, arguing that autobiography is an attempt to render embodied memories - in other words, it involves not just historical facts, but feelings, emotions, moods, pains, and sufferings. Obviously, autobiographers still have some ethical obligation to the historical record, given that they are talking about other people, but their real objective is to translate their lived experience into language, employing all the available - and, obviously, culturally structured and limited - rhetorical tools.
The book, as a whole, has the breezy prose typical of literary criticism, in that it slides too quickly between ideas without always announcing its structure. At times, his examples just aren't useful, especially the extended discussion in the closing chapter of what seemed like a convoluted essay - I'm intrigued by the idea that autobiography is actually about the future, but because he picked such an odd example, I didn't leave fully convinced by the time I finished the book. Finally, it's impossible to not observe his preoccupation with social class - quite frankly, the book is obviously written by a white dude, which is unfortunate given the impact of minorities and women on the genre. All that being said, he more than makes up for these drawbacks by being insightful and at times even moving, especially when talking about his father's illness. Eakin definitely is a fox and not a hedgehog, and it's refreshing to see him pull scholarship from so many disciplines together into a coherent argument.
The book, as a whole, has the breezy prose typical of literary criticism, in that it slides too quickly between ideas without always announcing its structure. At times, his examples just aren't useful, especially the extended discussion in the closing chapter of what seemed like a convoluted essay - I'm intrigued by the idea that autobiography is actually about the future, but because he picked such an odd example, I didn't leave fully convinced by the time I finished the book. Finally, it's impossible to not observe his preoccupation with social class - quite frankly, the book is obviously written by a white dude, which is unfortunate given the impact of minorities and women on the genre. All that being said, he more than makes up for these drawbacks by being insightful and at times even moving, especially when talking about his father's illness. Eakin definitely is a fox and not a hedgehog, and it's refreshing to see him pull scholarship from so many disciplines together into a coherent argument.
January 16, 2017
A set of connected essays in which a now retired English scholar of autobiography/life writing expands his focus to include the insights of psychologists, neurobiologists, and philosophers on the relationships between self, narrative, and self-narrative. Limited by his academic heritage in English studies, Eakin encounters but is unable to resolve or even fully codify the philosophical challenges of consciousness and the self, or the psychology of personality and self concept formation (but then who has?). Nevertheless, he fashions a case for the importance of self narrative to the creation and maintenance of identity and adds insights to where the raw materials for self narrative construction come from, what functions they fulfill, and what rules they follow. He is best when he focuses on individual works of life writing to illustrate his thinking, most notably for me in a short analysis of the creation of vantage points that one knows at the time one will later return to in memory as measuring sticks of life progress. Especially poignant for me as I have been reading this book in the same place (Kamaole Beach in Kihei, Maui) at which I was reading for my advanced degree in Psychology (focused on personality creation in oral autobiography) almost 30 years ago. Yes, I brought the book here especially to allow me to revisit that long retired interest.
July 25, 2015
Eakin, a well established scholar of autobiography, expands his ideas to include the neurological elements of what he calls 'narrative-identity' - that is, how telling stories about ourselves might, in certain ways, be embedded within our brain chemistry. This does not result in a dry or dis-engagingly scientific work, however, but serves to bolster his eloquent and absorbingly expressed insights regarding the function of narrative in constructing self-identity: in autobiographical writing and other forms of self-expression, along with more fundamentally biological mechanisms.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews