Self-Portrait in a Skewed Mirror

You're more than the star and author of your own life story. You're also the spin master. How you tell your tale reveals whether you see yourself as victim or victor, even when your story veers from the life you lived.

By Carlin Flora, published on January 01, 2006 - last reviewed on March 19, 2008

Noah Baumbach, now 36, actually lived out his boyhood fable, by becoming a writer and director who mines his own youth for celluloid gold: "In good and bad ways, I thought of myself as a filmmaker long before I was a filmmaker," he says. Baumbach reconstructs his parents' devastating divorce in the 1980s, along with first love, first break up and a helping of teen despair, in his latest movie The Squid and the Whale.

Baumbach views his late twenties and thirties as a time in which he had to consciously grow into his own myth, in large part by shedding some of the richly symbolic memories that he used to paint himself as an auteur before he really was.

"The story of the squid and the whale [found in the American Museum of Natural History] was a totem from my childhood," he says. "Making the movie was a way to obliterate that stuff and make new totems, instead." In assembling a CliffsNotes to his or her own emotional history, a teen begins compiling "self-defining memories" such as Baumbach's treasured museum expeditions. According to Jefferson Singer, professor of psychology at Connecticut College, self-defining memories are inevitably trotted out whenever adolescent soul-baring conversations take place. Such memories also provide narrative structure—much as a novel might have a theme and plot—for the rest of the life story to come.

The memories formed during adolescence are chock-full of "firsts": first kiss, the moment you knew you were gay, and so on. Because these incidents are predictive of future life chapters and versions of possible selves, they are the strongest and most frequently replayed memories. Psychologist David Rubin of Duke University has tested people for recall in areas from the Academy Awards to the World Series to big band tunes, and documented what he calls "a memory bump," in which middle-aged and older adults remember most vividly events that happened between the ages of 10 and 30, precisely when narrative identity takes shape.

In our early 20s, the "bumps" that will form the core narrative are still in flux. If you ask college students to tell you their most important memories, and then surprise them six months later by asking again, they will repeat stories at a rate of just 12 percent, Thorne found. Even when asked specifically, "What is your first memory?" subjects will rarely mention the same one twice. "Young adults have a high density of stored and retrievable memorable events," she says. "If we'd studied 60- or 70-year-olds, they probably would have selected an earliest memory that is the one they tell and retell. But [twentysomethings] don't have things tagged as the 'only one.'"

American Redemption

While each life story is unique, many people stick to culturally sanctioned scripts. Dan McAdams, for instance, has found that Americans, especially successful ones, often spin tales of redemption.

Take Sheila Cavanaugh, 45, whose young life was fraught with challenge. Growing up as one of eight children, she had three siblings with muscular dystrophy and a sister who died as a baby. When she was 20, their house burned down, and they lost all of their possessions. (Cavanaugh was about to spend her junior year abroad and salvaged only her plane ticket and passport from the flames.) At the age of 26, she had a stroke, after which she had to learn how to speak again and then to control a stutter. Today, however, she is a senior vice president of Fidelity Investments and a mother of three. Cavanaugh filters these facts through her thematic lens. "You can lose everything and start over, and there is value in that," she says. "Life in my family taught me that you have to work very hard to get what you want."

If Americans have a counterpoint to the redemption story, McAdams says, it is the contamination narrative: Once everything was perfect. Then something happened (a divorce, an accident), and things were never the same. The protagonist of a contamination story is a victim. "It's 'I got thrown out of the Garden of Eden because I bit into the apple, and there's no way I can get back in there because I'm already corrupted,'" McAdams explains.

"I'm 41 years old, but I still feel kind of lost," says Tanya Williams, a mother of four quoted in McAdams' book, The Re-demptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. "I know what to do when I get up every day, but do I really know where I am going?" As she tells it, she inherited her father's "love of the street," embarking on a dangerous life in her early teenage years. By age 13, she was drinking. By age 15, she was experimenting with drugs.

Even the high points in Tanya's life are tinged with disappointment. "Among midlife American adults, the birth of one's first child is the single most commonly told life-story high point," McAdams says. "And so it is for Tanya. But Tanya does not end the telling with the baby's birth. Instead, she immediately flashes forward three years. 'The baby's father was killed, you know. Stabbed in the back five times, found dead in a motel room,' she says." Tanya did not have to tell her story this way, McAdams observes. "But that is how she thinks of the sequence, reinforcing her belief that 'In general, good things do not happen to me.'"

The typical American narrative, meanwhile, differs dramatically from those reported by the Chinese, says psychologist Qi Wang of the College of Human Ecology at Cornell. Wang found that while American children provide elaborate and detailed personal memories, Chinese children serve up just skeletal accounts of their inner personal lives.