Comment Concerning Hannah's Child

I recently finished a memoir written by Stanley Hauerwas titled Hannah's Child.  A friend, Breanna Jones, recently posted a quote by Marisha Pessl on her blog that exemplifies an ideology that Mr. Hauerwas also holds. Well, at least the first part of the quote. 

I’m learning to tell my own story, and I am also learning to listen and to fall in love with everyone else’s story.
My favorite novel of all time, The Special Topics in Calamity Physics, says it best:

But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story, though you will be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don’t care what those themes are – they’re yours to uncover and stand behind – so long as, at the very least, there is courage. Guts. Mut, in German. Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up a Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

I believe Stanley and Marisha understand that all of our lives are intertwined, but there is a necessity of allowing someone else's story to form separately without impressing our own on theirs.