The story I tell myself

by Hazel Estella Barnes

The Story I Tell Myself is an engrossing account of one woman's psychological liberation from a false sense of what she wanted to be, and of the gradual development of a personal philosophy she was willing to live by. Before she finished college, Barnes had shed her religious beliefs, but she kept intact her inbred convictions that life was difficult, that she was accountable for what she made of her life, and that her actions should accord with her own values. She came of age in the era between Virginia Woolf and Betty Friedan, when women were beginning to break away from traditional...