The Stories We Live by: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self

No self-help treatise about exorcising fatalistic visions of one's life, this frequently wooden but intermittently arresting book proposes that ``each of us comes to know who he or she is by creating a heroic story of the self.'' McAdams, a Chicago psychologist, argues against archetypal myths, although he makes tantalizing if fleeting references to fairy tales and other properties of mass culture. A little heavy on developmental theory, the work hypothesizes how people begin to ``gather material'' for their ``self-defining stories'' in infancy and early childhood. In several case studies McAdams demonstrates the role of myth, while one of the stronger sections explains how to write a narrative to uncover personal myths, offering a list of questions for that purpose. Elsewhere, McAdams discusses ``imagoes''--defined as idealized concepts of self, the characters in personal narratives--and explores how such historical events as the Kennedy assassination are assimilated into one's own saga. (Mar.)