ered more deeply my own life, my relationship with my parents, and the part played by stories and storytelling in my life, I began to realize that my parents and I had indeed exchanged information and drama and experience through storytelling. In fact, I began to realize that most of the communications carried out in my family, as in Chernin's, was carried through storytelling.
What Chernin's book has done, then, in that respect, is to make me aware of the importance of stories in my own life. The more I read this book, and the more it led me to reflect on my own life, the more I realized how much I and my mother (and others in my family) share with Chernin and her mother.
Of course, the child's drive for independence from the parent, especially from the mother, is a drive not without sadness. it is inevitable for the health child to break from the parent through the creation of the child's own stories. Stories are not merely imaginative creations, but are rooted in the freedom and intelligence and experience of the individual. Stories are shaped by one'
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