Narrative Therapy: All Over But the Shoutin'

In Narrative Therapy people -author their lives, or story, by defining their own existence, thereby constructing reality by choices made to give meaning to a life. This type of therapy may be viewed as a protest against the socially imposed, dominant narrative, and a means of making sense of lived experience. People can be seen as problems, or as stories that allow multiple possibilities. Award winning writer Rick Bragg uses the concepts of narrative therapy in his book All Over But the Shoutin urning it into a therapeutic narrative of autobiographical memory. Bragg contends that his book is about getting even with life; getting even with the "rich snobs" who looked down on him because of his roots and the rural Southern way he uses English, and with his father. But his main reason for writing his memoir "is to set one thing straight" (Bragg, 1997, p. xix). He is referring to his mother who "believes that she failed," and Bragg wants to show that she did not fail because he became a successful journalist, a Pulitzer Prize winner, without disowning his past. Telling his story is important to him "because there should be a record of my momma's sacrifice even if it means unleashing ghosts" (p. xii). One of the points of narrative therapy is that it can aid in exorcising the ghosts in one's life, and this can be achieved by arranging "specific experiences of events of the past and present. . . in a lineal sequence" (White & Epston, 1990, p. 19).

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tory that is mapped out over time (Freedman & Combs, 1996, p. 15). This is true of Bragg's book that he divides into three parts covering three generations, mapping the effects of his "problem" story. The first part is his childhood, or his roots. The second part deals with Bragg's life as a successful, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and the final, most introspective part is what Bragg calls "getting even." In any book, be it a memoir or other form, long or short, not all experiences can be cited. The writer (or client in Narrative Therapy) must choose which particular stories or events to tell, and in so doing makes choices that shape the overall story. These "sparkling events" determine meaning and determine the outcome of the story. In a therapy session, the story can be retold and reshaped, but in a published book such as All Over But the Shoutin' the story has a definite ending. Two "sparkling events" give meaning to Bragg's life experiences, and these are told at near the beginning and end of the book. One experience is a three-year old Rick on his mother's back while she is dragging a canvas cotton sack, picking cotton; to the author that image sums up the way his mother carried her children, "with dignity" (Bragg,

Category: Literature - N