The Story of Your Life, from Beginning to End

“How could you live and have no story to tell?” — Dostoevsky

If you’re a parent, I’m sure you’ve experienced how your kids quickly developed an insatiable appetite for stories. How many nights did your three-year-old browbeat you into reading and rereading Goodnight, Moon when all you wanted to do was slug down apple martinis and binge-watch Downton Abbey or House of Cards? We remain story junkies from beginning to end. “We are told stories as children to help us bridge the abyss between waking and sleeping,” John Cheever wrote. “We tell stories to our own children for the same purpose. When I find myself in danger — caught on a stuck ski-lift in a blizzard — I immediately start telling myself stories. I tell myself stories when I am in pain and I expect as I lay dying, I will be telling myself a story in a struggle to make some link between the quick and the defunct.”

It all starts when we’re three or so. That’s when we begin creating our own stories. A story can be extraordinarily brief. Margaret Atwood, one of a number of writers invited by Wired magazine to compose a short story using only six words, turned out a classic, right up there with Emma Bovary: “Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”

Economical, yes. Plenty of emotion packed into those six words. But any toddler can create a story using only three words: “Me go poo.” “Me go poo” is the story a three-year-old can and inevitably will tell more than once before he moves on to a higher level of narrative construction. “Me go poo” may sound primitive, but it fulfills the criteria scholars say define a legitimate story:

1. There’s a protagonist (in this case, “me”).

2. There’s statement of a goal or desire (“to poo” or “have pooed”).

3. There’s an overt action relating to that goal or desire (will go/did go), which leads to the attainment or nonattainment of said goal or desire, which is to poo.

From here on out, decade after decade, stories will not only entertain you, they will explain you to others and to yourself. Your life story will be how you’ll “self-continue,” narrative psychologists say. As long as your memories flow freely, you’re in business. The story will go, there’ll be twists and turning points. But if something happens to disturb memory flow, you’ll have trouble self-continuing. The story will fizzle. Disorientation and worse — complete loss of identity — will play havoc with the story. Which is about as far from a happy ending as anyone can imagine.

The Point Is: Making Sense of Birth, Death, and Everything in Between is the story behind the story you’ve been telling yourself since the very beginning.