Is Your Life Story a Fiction?

The most common objection to the narrative view of personal identity is straightforward: stories are not lives. Narratives involve selectivity, spin, and sometimes outright self-deception, so treating identity as a kind of storytelling seems to mistake fiction for fact. In this lecture, Marya Schechtman takes this challenge seriously and responds with an analogy to scientific modeling. Just as a curve fitted through data points is not the data itself but can still be genuinely illuminating, a self-narrative can capture something real about a life without reproducing it in full. The key distinction is not between narrating and not narrating, but between narrating well and narrating badly. Schechtman then lays out four questions the narrative view must answer: how we learn to construct life narratives, what cultural templates guide us, why we self-narrate at all, and how self-narratives can go wrong. She argues that narrative identity serves social coordination and practical intelligibility, and that the relevant "dataset" is a person's full human history, understood in biopsychosocial terms rather than purely biological ones.