Family stories

Spurred by my recent attendance at the session on narrative gerontology, I've been doing some reading on narratives.  Right now I'm crawling through Reading Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old. I only understand about a third of it, and it is slow going, but today I ran across an interesting few paragraphs. The discussion was about the "culture of embeddedness" we encounter in our families of origin. In our family we learn (the book says "inherit") patterns for talking about our actions, expressing our emotions, and conveying our ideas.  We are exposed to entire strategies for composing and editing the stories of our lives; the little stories and the big ones.  Being conversant in this "family genre" is essential for our inclusion in the group.

However, this group is not static, it changes over time as people age, or die, and people come and go.  So both the players and their perspectives shift.  Here is a nice sociological line, "In short, we shape the stories we are part of even as they shape us."  It reminds me of the analogy we use for society and the effects of individuals, or cohorts, on society.  We can view social life as a river, it is bounded by shorelines, and those shorelines keep us "on track" in some sense.  However, the stream is also shifting the shorelines over time. Some parts are eroded, the course changes subtly or dramatically. So, the same idea we are shaping society as society shapes us.

Also interesting is the idea that there is some objective story or history and our individual perceptions of it.  I am always fascinated when my siblings and I start to compare childhood memories. We have very different versions of the same event, we even argue about the actual "facts"--who was there, where or when did it occur.  I like this sentence, "What we make of that history, however--the episodes that stand out for each of us andd the overall myth we have composed of it inside our own minds--is another matter."  I emphasized the word myth because I like the sense of our life stories being mythical.

Well, that was one page of reading.