Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life by Molly Andrews (review)

The photograph on the cover of Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life takes prospective readers to a time and space where children wallowed in their natural surroundings—between the cracks and branches of trees, over forbidden fences, and into unforgiving dirt. Their eyes may spell mischief but reveal little of the reservoir of memories that the boys will later tap for the stories and dreams that helped them choose paths that shaped their lives. The photograph summons two of my favorite lines of poetry, “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory” (Louise Gluck, Poems, 1962–2012 [New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2012], 342).

Molly Andrews codirects the University of East London’s Centre for Narrative Research and studies the role that imagination plays in constructing stories we tell ourselves and others about the world we inhabit. Imagination is not a mere spectator to our life lines, but a “creative synthesis” (7) that serves as the prompt or muse to our recollections and visions and forces us to contemplate the meanings we attribute to everyday experiences. As we continuously construct and edit those lines, Andrews notes, we eschew linearity and “constantly move backwards and forwards in our mind’s eye, [as we] ponder the meaning of Robert Frost’s ‘the road not taken’ in our lives [and] look back on the selves we once were, selves who we are both connected to but who are distinct from our current selves” (3).

Narrative Imagination is an analysis and synthesis of Andrews’s research about people sharing their stories or life lines in five chapters. Chapter 1 lays the philosophical and psychological groundwork through a discussion of the interplay of narrative and imagination and the everyday stories that result. Also useful in the chapter are discussions of the construction of the self and collective imaginations in the context of globalization and social media.

Chapter 2, Knowledge, Belief, and Disbelief, examines the milieu of the academic researcher who searches for meaning in the imagination and stories of others. Moving between the methodological and ethical tensions of an interview, the primary method of gathering narrative data, Andrews wonders about a researcher’s capacity and willingness to suspend disbelief and fully empathize with a subject (teller). Such a tension begins in childhood when we are most willing to believe the “magic” in the tales we are told by adults, until one day we declare that we know the stories are unreal. Yet that does not mean the death of the imagination and of the willingness to suspend disbelief, but a shift in the psychology, social contexts, and vested interests in the magic in the stories shared.

The discussion in chapter 3, Ageing, addresses how the magic shifts over the arc of one’s life. Andrews is interested in “the selves we hope to grow into, the selves we are becoming,” and advises us to create a blueprint for our own aging, being attuned to our changing contexts, the people we encounter, and the artifacts (“pebbles”) we gather on our journey (34). She insists that our journeys are brimming with such accoutrements, negative and positive, which we should contemplate, apprehend, and shape into our narrative of becoming.

In chapter 4, Education, the discussion shifts to the classroom and the imperative to reconsider how we handle the creativity and imagination of children like those in the cover photograph. Andrews suggests that we redefine our role as teachers and our relationships with our students; teachers need an “ability to communicate the interrelatedness between their teaching, their research, and their lives” (65). Such teachers are able to listen to students’ stories and are willing to share their own stories in order to make abstractions real. Andrews invokes the spirit of educational philosophers such as bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Martha Nussbaum to call for pedagogies of democratic citizenship and social change.

Thus chapter 5, Politics, is aptly placed to extend the discussion of the pedagogy of narratives to a macrolevel...