Stories are told when we look back in time, reflect on past events and interpret them in the light of our present situation. It seems that a temporal gap between the past and present is needed in order to make sense of past events and to create stories that are meaningful to us. But how can a major physical space influence our stories? For example, when people decide to leave their birth countries and live in another country, they create a physical space between the past events and the narrated events in their stories. Hence, both time and space play significant roles in how we shape our stories and attach meaning to them. The physical space that was created between my early life and my current life as the result of moving to the UK, made me reinterpret many life events which otherwise I wouldn’t redefine them if I hadn’t moved to the UK. We can then argue that similar to the clock-model of time that cannot adequately explain the reinterpretation of stories, the static model of space should also be challenged when we study life stories. I have realised when telling my life story, the physical spaces in “the told” or “the actual event” (Mishler 1995) are not fixed anymore. I shift them in “the telling” or “the narrative” and fit them wherever they need to be placed to sound more meaningful.
