An Analysis and Personal Response to "The Whores Child" by Richard Russo

Everyone lives in a world that is created within his or her brain. What we hear and what we see is different for every person; we give meaning to our perception and change it to make it fit to what we expect, and what we need to survive. Often we lie to ourselves and do not see the simple facts of something that happened in order to go on. "The Whore's Child," by Richard Russo is a very realistic piece that uses different literary elements of short stories to introduce us to sister Ursula, an aging nun who, through a college writing class, discovers the lie she had been telling herself over a lifetime, and also helps her professor discover some truth about his own life. Ursula is the child of a prostitute and a pimp. When she was young, she was sent away to convent school full of nun's, where she was abused and mistreated because of her background. After her mother dies, she joins the deity and grows up to become one of the nuns she hated so much. …