ABSTRACT
The illness and death of my mother and father bracket the writing of this book. In the 4 years I worked on it, the passing of my parents heightened my awareness and appreciation of the power of story to create and recreate us. And it is precisely that power I found in the book clubs in which my colleagues and I participated and studied. Most significantly, it was the experience of finding one’s “self” in a storyand of discovering that stories of self do not so much reinforce as they construct who we are-and who others are to us. And so, in that spirit, I end this book with an examination of the transformative power of personal narrative, one that draws both on my own family’s stories and on the published autobiographies read and discussed in our book clubs.
