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Why I'm Like This: True Stories


// Why I’m Like This: True Stories // is a piece of creative non-fiction by Cynthia Kaplan. She writes about her life from about her mid-teens to the present. She starts off with a time when her and her friends are at a camp in Maine. There is a girl, Caroline, that everyone continues to humiliate and make fun of, and year after year, she continues to return to the camp. She, herself, doesn’t understand why they make fun of her, but she doesn’t do anything to stop it. Cynthia learns that the popular thing is not always the right thing. Another experience is when her grandmother goes “crazy”. She finds that things that were once were important to her, aren’t significant anymore. She doesn’t care about her favorite pocketbook that she always had with her or the precious piano that she used to play everyday. All of her things that she used to treasure slowly begin to die, and eventually, she does. At first, Cynthia cannot accept the fact that everything about her grandmother is gone, but in time, she learns that things that have already happened should be accepted. She becomes stronger through this experience and helps to become a better person. She also tells about a time when her first boy was born. She explains that her baby is tending to favor her husband rather than herself. She explains the feeling of jealousy and “fights” to win her baby’s love back. When she finally does, she describes the relief and joy she feels after having her child loves her “again”. Everything that happens to Cynthia, the good and the bad, affected about who she is. She chooses the ones that affected her the most and put them into a book. The things that we are afraid to say out loud, the thoughts that we hold deep inside our hearts, she says. The theme of Cynthia Kaplan's book, //Why I'm Like This//, is that life is tough. Everybody knows this! So why does she bother to write a book about it? So far, she writes about difficult situations in life, how she squirmed out of them, and how they changed her mentally and emotionally. She tells the story from the point of view of the person she was mad/angry/sad at. For example, "Bob punched me, so I got angry, and I picked up a rock, and I threw it at him, and I walked away, and I... and I... and I..." Everything is about what you did from your perspective. Cynthia Kaplan does the total opposite. The book is still in first person, but it is like she is telling you a story of someone else. It almost seems like Cynthia just happened to be in the same room and was indirectly affected by the conflict in that particular place with those certain people. The reason she is writing in this peculiar way, is because she wants to show you that events in other people's lives can and will affect you. You can't just walk away your friends' or family's problems. If they need help, give it to them, even if it means to just sit there and listen. You may learn something out of their experience also. I agree with what Cynthia is saying. Give what you can, even if it means nothing to you. It may mean everything to someone else. I think that the fact that she had a hard time moving on when her grandma died was something that I disliked. She spent about a whole chapter describing about each little object that her grandma began to forget and how amnesia affected her grandmother’s life. This book is about Cynthia Kaplan, not her grandma. So, I think that she could have described how her death of her grandmother inflicted her life instead of how amnesia affected her grandmother. [|Why I'm Like This Review] [|Cynthia Kaplan Biography]