How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (review)

This is a major book on theoretical issues that have bedeviled the study of autobiography since the wave of deconstruction in the 1970s swept away the unexamined identification of selves in texts. Paul John Eakin makes new sense of the paradoxes involved in writing one's own life. He invents new critical categories, builds on the insights of other scholars of autobiography, and borrows thoughtfully from neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and the law. No less usefully, he chooses texts to illustrate his ideas with unflagging precision. In fact, the contemporary autobiographies he writes about may have spurred him to find new ways to describe them, old ways seeming inadequate to the task. Those looking for insightful commentary on specific texts, or new terms in which to think about autobiography in general, will find much to satisfy them in this book.

Since Eakin sees autobiography as a written version of the process of identity formation everyone engages in throughout life, he easily adapts psychological ideas to the study of autobiographies. Using recent findings in neurology and psychology, he opens the book by arguing that all selves are multiple, relational, and profoundly embodied, in contrast with the Cartesian tradition of a disembodied cogito that grounds traditional individualist thinking about selves, and thus autobiography. He applies to men and women understandings of identity that have been developed over the last thirty years about women, largely by women psychologists and literary scholars. Eakin has searched for and found empirical grounds for extending these less individualist ideas of identity to all people, irrespective of sex or gender. At times, Eakin chafes against the way that language reinforces traditional understandings of identity, and so he uses the term "self-experience" to supplement the isolation and autonomy implied by "self." He has read widely in recent psychological and neuroscientific writing about identity, identity formation, memory, and the physical basis of consciousness, making excellent use of the works of Jerome Bruner, Antonio Damasio, Gerald Edelman, Robyn Fivush, Ulric Neisser, Katherine Nelson, Israel Rosenfield, Oliver Sacks, and Daniel Schacter, among many others, to explain self-experience. His discussions of Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face and Robert F. Murphy's The Body Silent well illustrate his argument about the necessary embodiment of the self.

Eakin's second major theme delves more deeply into relational identity, one constructed and manipulated by involvement with other people. He invents the category of relational autobiography, narratives in which relational identity is clearly in play, suggesting as he goes along that all autobiography can be reunderstood in relational terms. Since the publication in 1980 of James Olney's Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical and Estelle Jelinek's Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, discussions of autobiography have struggled to accommodate several competing forces, two of the strongest of which have been the universalizing desire to describe all autobiography theoretically and historically, and the desire to construct women's autobiography as a separate category operating on its own rules. Given their contradictory goals, it is not surprising that neither of these forces has been completely successful. But Eakin's book is one of several recent indications that these two forces may have discovered some common cause. His theories and practice suggest that differences and similarities between men's and women's autobiography may be recast as matters of degree rather than kind. Following the lead of Susanna Egan, Shirley Neuman, and Nancy K. Miller, who have proposed that relational identity needs to be mapped across gender lines in autobiography, Eakin has worked out some of the implications for autobiography of relational identity. He assembles a group of contemporary autobiographies whose model of identity is relational, including Chip Brown's New Yorker story of Chris McCandless's life and death in the Alaskan wilderness and Jon Krakauer's treatment of it in Into the Wild, Caroline Kay...