ugh the telling of stories. In Chernin's case, the storytelling is formalized, in an almost religious sense, as if the stories of the mother and her past, and then of the daughter and her experiences, were sacred tales carrying spiritual truths from generation to generation in the form of oral and written adventures. All is not harmony in this process, however. The conflict between mother and daughter enters with respect to the ownership of the stories and the independence of the particular storyteller.
Whether we know it or not, each of us is both bound to the stories of our parents about their lives, and at the same time driven to break free from those bounds by telling our own stories, by interpreting our own lives imaginatively, and even by altering the stories of the parent in order to make them his or her own. Both Chernin and her mother use different strategies with respect to claiming and changing stories in order to declare their power or independence in the relationship. We are only free, Chernin seems to be saying, to the degree that we do break away from our parents' stories and create our own stories out of the experience and imagination of our separate and individual lives.
We can admire and learn from our parents' stories, from the suffering and joy and wisdom of those stories, but finally it is up to us to define ourselves through our own stories. It would be seem to me that a reader who has no stories of his or her own would read this book by Chernin and feel a void within, would suspect that something of importance is missing from his or her life.
I myself at first felt somewhat empty as I read this book. Compared to Chernin and her mother, I felt that I and my parents had not shared the kind of storytelling portrayed in the book. I felt at first that as a result perhaps my own intellectual, emotional and spiritual growth had in some sense been stunted as a result of that deficiency. However, when I consid...