Being a Widow and Other Life Stories: The Interplay between Lives and Words

This article looks at life stories, not just as tales about the past but as creative acts of self‐making and culture making. It explores life stories told by older women in West Bengal, India, focusing on one told by a childless widow. Previous scholars have made the important distinction between life as represented (through telling a story) and life as (actually) lived and experienced. This article suggests a somewhat different track: telling a life story—like other forms of talk or communication—is part of life as lived because, of course, it is lived and experienced, at least during the moments of telling.