Shankar Vedantam

Talk a moment about how the act of storytelling itself might be a way of regaining some sense of agency.

Yeah, this is actually something I've been thinking a lot about recently.

Certainly one of the things that drew me to the field of studying narrative identity was the idea that you can't always control what happens to you, but you can control the story you tell about what happens to you.

And to a large extent, I think that is true.

You know, as I've said, we're both the main character and the narrator of our life story.

And we do have agency to tell stories that support our well-being.

So I don't want to diminish the importance of that at all.

But at the same time, our stories don't just exist in our heads, right?

Stories are meant to be told.

And if you're telling a story about your life that other people don't affirm, it's actually quite hard to keep living out that story.

Yeah.

where people lose control over their life stories.

Can you talk about how the big events in our lives, weddings, the birth of children, the death of loved ones, how these might be particularly powerful occasions to tell both contamination and redemption stories?

Yeah, so big events like that, to a certain extent, play into a different kind of master narrative.

We call this in my field the cultural concept of biography, which means in any given culture, there's sort of an expected timeline of milestones.

And so when your life coincides with those milestones, there's a socially acceptable pressure for you to narrate those.

So I...

was doing a study years ago where we were reading transcripts of entire life stories.

And my students who were working with the narratives said, I can't read another high point that is about a wedding or the birth of a first child.

And it's just like, right.