I've always believed that if you want to understand a people's culture, you need to know the stories they tell. Everything from the tales about the heroes in their mythology to the stories that form the basis for their belief system will tell you more about how a people define themselves than any fact based history.

In some ways stories are the popular history of a culture. They may be dismissed as legend or myth by so-called serious scholars, but if you look closely enough you'll find that they were all based on fact. Over the years they have all been embellished to some degree or other, but what stories haven't had their lilies gilded to some extent anyway? For the longest time, the only records that we had of Troy's existence were from Homer's account of the war, and nobody believed them to be true until Troy was unearthed in the late 19th century. There might not have been the direct involvement of the Gods and Goddesses in the battle as was depicted in Homer's Odyssey, but the fact remained the war between Greece and Troy really occurred.

Although in the greater scheme of things a family's stories may not seem important, they bear the same relationship to a family's history as a culture's stories do its history. Whether you know it or not, all families have stories, even yours, that are as unlikely as any mythology. You may not think so looking at your parents, but think about where they came from. Look back to your great-grandparent's generation on each side of the family and find out where they were. What are the odds that they would have children who would marry, have children of their own who would meet and marry, to finally meet to create you? If that's not the stuff of myth I don't know what is.

In his newest work, The Hakawati (roughly translated as the story-teller) being released April 22 by Random House Canada's Knopf imprint, Rabih Alameddine has created a glorious tapestry by interweaving the threads of one family's story with the stories of the Arab world. In doing so, not only does he give truth to the cliche that fact can be stranger than fiction, he shows how fine a line there really is between myth and history, and how the one gives birth to the other.