Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narrative

In "Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narrative", the fourth volume in the series "The Narrative Study of Lives," Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen Josselson, and Amia Lieblich bring together an interdisciplinary and international group of creative researchers and theorists to examine the way the stories we tell create our identities. An increasing number of psychologists argue that people living in modern societies give meaning to their lives by constructing and internalizing self-defining stories. The contributors to this volume explore how, beginning in adolescence and young adulthood, our narrative identities become the stories we live by. This volume addresses the most important and difficult issues in the study of narrative identity, including questions of unity and multiplicity in stories, the controversy over individual versus societal authorship of stories, and the extent to which stories typically show stability or growth in the narrator. The detailed examination of excerpts from stories told to researchers and the analysis of published memoirs, together with the contributors' insights into narrative psychology, make this provocative volume a rich, research-based exploration into how our lives may be the product of the stories we tell.