A life story doesn’t just say what happened, it says why it was important, what it means for who the person is, for who they’ll become, and for what happens next. This narrative becomes a form of identity, in which the things someone chooses to include in the story, and the way she tells it, can both reflect and shape who she is. In the realm of narrative psychology, a person’s life story is not a Wikipedia biography of the facts and events of a life, but rather the way a person integrates those facts and events internally-picks them apart and weaves them back together to make meaning. They are personality, or more accurately, they are important parts of personality, along with other parts, like dispositional traits, goals, and values,” writes Dan McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, along with Erika Manczak, in a chapter for the APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology. “Life stories do not simply reflect personality. In telling the story of how you became who you are, and of who you’re on your way to becoming, the story itself becomes a part of who you are. Though perhaps the facts of someone’s life, presented end to end, wouldn’t much resemble a narrative to the outside observer, the way people choose to tell the stories of their lives, to others and-crucially-to themselves, almost always does have a narrative arc. ‘I suppose-this sounds stupid, but I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc.’”īut it’s not stupid at all. “‘What did you expect?’” a friend responds. “‘It’s just not how I expected my life would be,’” he says. In Paul Murray’s novel Skippy Dies, there’s a point where the main character, Howard, has an existential crisis.
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