Messy Self

The Messy Self challenges the idea -- and the ideal -- of a coherent, harmonious self. Taken together, the essays illustrate how a flourishing self is inevitably divided, ambivalent, fractured, messy -- and how the self triumphs through disorder. Written in accessible language by award-winning writers and scholars, the book offers a diversity of perspectives on the complexities of the self. With chapters on creativity, love, self-understanding, self-deception, identity, responsibility, and well-being, The Messy Self gives a range of voices to the ordinary and extraordinary divisions, fragmentations, and uncertainties that mark our everyday experience.

Jennifer Rosner

Part I Love and the Messy Self; Chapter 1 A Strange Disorder, Diane Ackerman; Chapter 2 My Tourette's, Gayle Pemberton; Chapter 3 Conservation, Debra Spark; Chapter 4 The Mommy at the Zoo, Beth Ann Fennelly; Chapter 5 Prologue to Psyche, Jane F. Qrosthwaite; Chapter 6 Psyche in Love, Wendy Wasserstein; Chapter 7 Since You Came, John O'Donohue; Part II Self-Understanding and the Messy Self; Chapter 8 The Clause, C. K. Williams; Chapter 9 The Last Place on Earth, Patricia Foster; Chapter 10 Facing North, Mary Kinzie; Chapter 11 The Fiction of the Self and the Self of Fiction, Rebecca Goldstein; Chapter 12 The Real Story, Liv Pertzoff; Chapter 13 The Envoy, Jane Hirshfield; Part III Self-Deception and the Messy Self; Chapter 14 The Superficial Unity of the Mind, Sarah Buss; Chapter 15 Kidding Ourselves*, Steven Pinker; Chapter 16 Man Alone, Louise Bogan; Part IV Identification and the Messy Self; Chapter 17 The Disappearance, Ilan Stavans; Chapter 18 With Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Richard Chess; Chapter 19 Gifts, Faith Adiele; Chapter 20 Song of the Red Earth, Meena Alexander; Chapter 21 We're All Colored, Huston Diehl; Part V Well-Being and the Messy Self; Chapter 22 Winnicott on the Surprises of the Self, Martha C. Nussbaum; Chapter 23 Buried, Carol Edelstein; Chapter 24 Legal Selves, Robin West; Part VI Creativity and the Messy Self; Chapter 25 Unimaginative, Corwin Ericson; Chapter 26 The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks; Chapter 27 You ..., there ..., listening ..., Donald Morrill;