provide the structure of life" (White, 1992, p. 123). Bragg examines his past experiences with love and hatred, with self-doubt and self-knowledge, with resentment and pride, with anger and compassion. He struggles to leave his harsh past behind him, but is too tightly tied to it. And he does not want to squander "the knowledge and the stories that (my mother) and my people hold inside them" (Bragg, 1997, p. xvi).
A key concept of Narrative Therapy is that writing and re-writing one's own life story can give "positive meaning to what others might have experienced as adversity" (Freedman & Combs 1996, p. 10). Bragg's youth was one of adversity but in his book he reinterprets the "objective" reality of his childhood experiences as the second of three sons of a poverty-stricken "white-trash" family in rural Alabama, of an alcoholic, abusive father and of a self-sacrificing, loving mother. To a large degree, Bragg relates his story in terms of his mother. He describes himself as the boy who climbed up her backbone "to escape the poverty and hopelessness that ringed them, free and clean" (Bragg, 1997, p. xii). Even though Bragg is a trained journalist, in a memoir that rewrites his past, objective reality can be subjective, or at least selective. Bragg, after all, has an agenda. He wants to vent his rage and resentment at people who did him wrong ûhis father, rich people and teachers who looked down on him b
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