The myths we live by uses recorded life stories in a novel way offering a rare view of how memory and tradition are continually reshaped and recycled to make sense of the past from the standpoint of the present. Focused primarily on recent memory, the examples stretch from the transcient myths of contemporary Italian school children on strike, back to the legends of classical Greece, and the traditional storytelling of Canadian Indians. Their range is international - German Dutch maids, Puerto Rican mothers in New York, Australian soldiers, Swedish concentration camp survivors. Cumulatively, they advocate a transformed history, which actively relates subjective and objective, past and present, politics and poetry - history as living force in the present.