My Many Selves

The Quest for a Plausible Harmony

Wayne C. Booth

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780874215359
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Biographies

His memoir, My Many Selves, is both an incisive self-examination and a creative approach to retelling his life. Writing his autobiography became a quest to harmonize the diverse, discordant parts of his identity and resolve the conflicts in what he thought and believed. To see himself clearly and whole, he broke his self down, personified the fragments, uncovered their roots in his life, and engaged his multiple identities and experiences in dialogue. Basic to his story and to its lifelong concerns with ethics and rhetoric was his youth in rural Utah. He valued that background, while acknowledging its ambiguous influence on him, and continued to identify himself as Mormon, though he renounced most Latter-day Saint doctrines.

Wayne Booth died in October 2005, soon after completing work on his autobiography.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Part One My Toughest “Self-Splits” and What Produced Them
• Part Two The Splits Multiply—in Somewhat Less Torturous Form
• Interlude A Potpourri of Chapters I Refuse to Write (Let Alone Include)
• Part Three Aging, Religion, and—Surprise!—the Quest for a Plausible Harmony
• Index