The Story of Your Life: Becoming the Author of Your Experience [Paperback]

Mandy Aftel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 20, 1997

Is your life a page-turner? A yawner? A cliched story you're tired of repeating? Every life is a story, says therapist Mandy Aftel, but the story of your life doesn't have to read like a bad novel, filled with guilt, anger, and hopelessness that limit your understanding of the past and close off possibilities for the future. Even ordinary lives have the elements of great literature, and we can revise trite or destructive story lines to craft a new narrative of courage, fulfillment, and imagination. Using examples from literature and life and a range of imaginative thinking and writing exercises, Aftel guides us in the creation of an artful existence, full of the complexity, insight, and excitement of a great novel.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Every life is a story, says Mandy Aftel. We tell the stories of our lives to friends and neighbors, on job interviews and blind dates, at slumber parties and in therapy. Too often, though, the stories we tell -- and live -- are cliches, simplistic tales of blame, guilt, hopelessness, and anger that limit our understanding of the past and close off possibilities for the future.

But the story of your life doesn't have to read like bad fiction. In this tremendously original and insightful book, Aftel shows how we can assume authorship, revising trite or destructive story lines and crafting new narratives of courage, fulfillment, imagination, and unfolding potential. Filled with imaginative exercises for rethinking and rewriting your life story! Highly recommended. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Brilliant insights by a therapist who offers, in place of Prozac, practical steps to rewriting the story of your life. A stimulating way to get started on a new passage. -- Gail Sheehy, author of New Passages --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone (June 20, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684826968
• ISBN-13: 978-0684826967
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,161,092 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Positive Authorship, February 15, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Story of Your Life: Becoming the Author of Your Experience (Paperback)

Wonderfully well written and thoroughly thought out.

If ever you've wondered how some people can describe their lives as the same dilemmas, year after year, you'll understand after reading this insightful book. Using the metaphor of "Stories", Ms. Aftel illustrates how our lives are dramas lived out each day by us as actors and written each day by us as self-authors. While this is not the first written work to depict life as a story, it is one of the most thorough in illustrating how we consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, pre-define our lives with the story-like reality-perceptions we choose to adopt.

Where one might opt to use their "story" as a tool for understanding their history, the most significant opportunities are for "self-authoring" our present and future. Understanding our stories is a first step--a powerful first step. Using our understanding of our own and others people's stories for designing our future empowers us to live fuller, happier, healthier lives.

This book is also beautifully written. While there are well grounded ideas within every page, the book reads like an interactive fireside conversation. The author skillfully weaves her own experiences into the powerful examples and scenarios. While Ms. Aftel never quite admits that any of the painful experiences are hers, we can all hear her pain in some of the written words. Not to be dismayed, the book shines a very positive and optimistic picture...we are each able to author our own lives, recognize our own plots and craft our own stories.

This book deserves its five stars.

19 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Restructuring Your Life, June 7, 2000

By 

Joseph (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Story of Your Life: Becoming the Author of Your Experience (Paperback)

This book is about writing the story of your life to gain insight into the maladaptive patterns of your life, and to restructure your life in the light of the self-knowledge you gained from this process. Most people don't need apsychiatric set up to gein deeper understanding of their lives. What they need is a guide, like abook of this kind, to help review and come to terms with their lives, and to move forward and live an authentic life. Ms. Aftel's book will certainly meet those needs, and it is an exceptionallygod self-help book of its kind. It is a structured, profound, and skillful guide for those who are serious about exploring their own lives.

Working on the superb exercises given in this book is not a substitute therapy for major psychiatric problems. Such interrventions are not within the scope of this book, abd the author does not make such claims either. But I find this book valuable in facilitating therapy for those who are in therapy with a competent therapist. I have taught and practiced psychology for nearly forty years, of which 25 years were spent in the Psychiatric Departments of the University of Chicago and the Northwestern University. I lead a Psycho-oncology program in a suburb of Chicago where I include Aftel's writing the Story of Your Life as part of the therapy protocol. I strongly recommend a five star rating for this book.

11 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Exploration of Creativity and Self-Reliance, May 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Story of Your Life: Becoming the Author of Your Experience (Paperback)

As a writer and reviewer of mental health literature for more than 35 years, I found Ms. Aftel's approach fresh and innovative. All I can say about the critics of such invitations to creative expression is-----LIGHTEN UP PEOPLE. Clearly, this book is for people who are willing to consider different ways of resolving their personal issues and moving toward increasing creativity and freedom in much the same manner as Julia Cameron's books. I found each of the exercises in the book unique and a force for powerful insight into one's life.

The book reinforces individual responsibility and creativity. To suggest, as one of the review postings here does, that the book is pseudotherapy and analogous to boundary confusion and sex with a patient is outrageous. It also suggests that the critic's agenda has addled his (or her) rational faculties. Such logic condemns every form of self-enpowerment as somehow preventing needed treatment and requires complete adherence to a concept of therapuetic dependency, rather than indvidual expression. This is a book about enpowerment through creativity. Read the book. Better yet, practice its exercises.