The Shapes of Stories (Part IIa): The Stories That Tell Us
What inherited stories demand—and what it costs to refuse them.
In Part I of this series, we explored the shape of stories we crave—the mythic arc of rupture, struggle, and return that fulfills the promise of redemption. This particular story shape helps us make meaning of hardship and offer coherence in the face of chaos. We reach for redemption stories instinctively, especially in our darkest moments of uncertainty.
But what happens when that shape doesn’t fit your lived experience? What options exist when you reject that shape? Even worse, what happens when the story that you’re expected to follow wasn’t authored by you at all?
Long before we consciously craft a story about who we are, we are shaped by the stories that surround us. Some of these are empowering, but many are limiting. They whisper rules about who we’re allowed to be, how we’re expected to behave, and what kinds of change are possible—or impossible.
Psychologist Dan McAdams, a leading figure in personality psychology, describes this as our narrative identity: the internalized, evolving account we carry of who we are, how we came to be, and where we’re going. According to McAdams, this story isn’t just a reflection of our experiences—it becomes the structure through which we interpret them. It helps us organize memory, justify our choices, and imagine our futures.
But before we begin to tell that story with intention, we spend years absorbing the plots around us. These “inherited” narratives, as I call them, are passed down through families, faith traditions, national myths, school systems, and popular culture. They teach us what kinds of lives are imaginable, what counts as success, and what transformation is supposed to look like. They don’t just shape our understanding of change. They shape our sense of self.
Or, in Marxist terms, they shape our subject position—what theorists like Louis Althusser (and later Theodor Adorno) called interpellation: the process by which ideology “calls” us into specific roles within a social order. Once, this process was enforced through institutions: the church, the school, the state. Today, it often arrives as narrative. As advice. As “common sense.”
You don’t need to think of grand narratives to feel its weight. These stories show up in the background hum of daily life—sometimes in passing comments, sometimes in your own internal monologue:
“People like us don’t do things like that.”
“You have to work twice as hard to get half as far.”
“College isn’t for everyone.”
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“She’s just difficult to work with.”
“You can have it all.”
“Money doesn’t buy happiness.”
“Don’t make it about race.”
“If you work hard enough, you’ll succeed.”
They sound like advice. Wisdom. Perspective. But often, they are actually coping mechanisms in disguise—narrative strategies for surviving unjust systems. Instead of naming inequality, they individualize it, and instead of questioning power, they moralize suffering. They offer a way to make sense of struggle, but only by translating structural harm into personal responsibility. (I’ll unpack this idea fully in a future series, where I will discuss the flawed rhetoric surrounding the idea of “merit.”)
These aren’t just stories we live inside; they are stories that live inside us. We inherit these scripts and perform them without any conscious thought, and from a certain point of view, they don’t just describe reality, they produce it. These inherited narratives shape how we interpret experience, what we expect of ourselves, and what we believe we’re allowed to want.
And here is where the real trouble begins: sometimes, you try to follow the story, and you try to be the hero of the story. But sometimes, the arc doesn’t hold, the transformation never arrives, and the meaning you were promised never materializes.
What happens then?
When the Story Fails You
We’re taught to believe that pain leads somewhere. That struggle builds character. That trauma, if properly metabolized, will yield insight. These aren’t just cultural hopes—they’re narrative expectations. We fold them into our understanding of what a “meaningful life” looks like. We expect every wound to have a purpose. Every setback to foreshadow a comeback.
But sometimes the story doesn’t resolve. Sometimes the healing doesn’t come. The meaning doesn’t materialize. The arc stalls.
And when that happens, it isn’t just disappointing—it’s disorienting. We’re left with a sense of narrative betrayal, as if we missed a cue, skipped a scene, or failed to play the part correctly. But the failure isn’t always ours. Sometimes the script just doesn’t fit.
Some lives seem to follow the arc exactly—struggle, transformation, redemption—until suddenly they don’t. And when that rupture comes, it destabilizes not just our perception of that person, but our faith in the arc itself.
That’s how I felt when we lost Anthony Bourdain. Like I’d misread the story…or had confused him with a different character.
I’ll confess that Bourdain is one of my idols, as a writer, chef, and general human being. I first read him just out of my MFA program, walking to and from the streetcar in New Orleans, my nose buried in Kitchen Confidential or A Cook’s Tour and one eye scanning for broken sidewalks and hazardous tree roots. Right away I was enraptured with his voice—frank, even brusque. It felt raw and unfinished, like a room where the paint hadn’t dried and you weren’t sure if you liked the color. He was somehow open and evasive at the same time, and I knew I wanted to write like he wrote. Or at least live the kind of life he was living so I could write about it.
As time went on, I admired him for more than just his voice. He was obviously a student of life—curious, obsessive, constantly evolving. My favorite moments were when he’d name-drop a writer he loved or sit down with a friend in a quiet moment of honest affection. For all his swagger and apparent cynicism, he demonstrated deep humility. He asked real questions. He listened—really listened. He tried to show us not to be afraid of each other. And he never tolerated bullshit when he saw it.
He had struggled with addiction, drifted through years of instability, and lived at the edges of burnout—but eventually rebuilt his life through writing, travel, and food. On Parts Unknown, he didn’t just explore cuisine; he explored conflict, grief, and belonging. He wasn’t just admired—he was narratively satisfying. He represented the story we want to believe: that suffering deepens the soul, that experience yields perspective, that scars become a kind of emotional capital.
And Bourdain had that perspective. He once said,
Maybe that’s enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity… perhaps wisdom is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
That kind of humility—what we might call earned wisdom—is often envied. It seems like the hard-won reward for struggle, proof that the pain was worth something. The dominant narrative is that our suffering means something, earns us something.
But even that story didn’t hold. By every outward measure, Bourdain had “made it.” He had written over a dozen books—memoir, fiction, essays, cookbooks—and hosted more than 250 episodes of television across three groundbreaking shows: A Cook’s Tour, No Reservations, and Parts Unknown, which won multiple Emmys and a Peabody Award. He had global recognition, critical acclaim, financial freedom, and a kind of cultural authority few achieve. He was a celebrity who still felt authentic, a traveler who still felt curious. But like so many people who seem to “have it all,” who appear to have achieved everything the script promises, Bourdain found himself lost when the arc ran out. Friends recalled him saying, near the end, “I should be happy. I have everything. But I’m not.”
His death by suicide in 2018 fractured the narrative we thought he was living. It reminded us that clarity isn’t peace. That wisdom doesn’t guarantee relief. That even the most resonant life can become unreadable when the story it’s been shaped into no longer makes sense.
That kind of confused sadness is compounded by guilt—because everything around you, especially the story you’ve been handed, insists that you should be happy. You followed the arc. You did everything right. And still, the promised ending never arrives.
Sometimes, in those moments, we’re able to revise the script. To find a new shape.
But sometimes, we’re not.
This gap - this inability to revise the narrative of our own lives - is part of the subtle violence of inherited stories: their demand for shape, their intolerance of contradiction. We form our lives into stories because stories offer coherence. But they can also confine us by forcing us to reduce the complexity of existence into simpler, predetermined arcs, or pressuring us to find the “grand lessons” in our suffering.
And when the dominant narrative demands healing, growth, and triumph over adversity—but your lived experience doesn’t match—it creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. You begin to wonder whether your pain even counts if it doesn’t produce a moral lesson and sagacity. It can become unclear you’ve failed the story, or whether the story has failed you.
The Demand for Meaning
Literary critic Parul Sehgal describes the burden of the trauma plot—the flattening of human pain into a predictable sequence of redemptive beats. In contemporary fiction, film, and memoir, trauma has become a kind of narrative engine: it provides motivation, deepens character, earns empathy, and—most importantly—promises transformation. The trauma is supposed to lead somewhere. It is supposed to mean something.
But what happens when it doesn’t?
Sehgal argues that the trauma plot often bypasses complexity in favor of catharsis. It reduces suffering to a device, a pivot point, a lesson waiting to be unlocked. When a story refuses to move forward—when the pain lingers, when the healing doesn’t arrive—it becomes unreadable. The audience grows impatient. They want resolution, not repetition. Meaning, not mess.
But life is often a mess. Real trauma is often shapeless. It echoes. It recurs. And when our cultural narratives don’t allow space for that—when we’re trained to expect insight where there is only ache—we’re left not just unsupported, but unseen. Our pain becomes illegible. Our experience, unrecognizable—even to ourselves.
The trauma plot is especially common in memoir—arguably, it has come to define the genre. Readers expect a personal history of adversity, followed by insight, growth, and some form of resolution. Trauma becomes the narrative engine, and survival becomes the arc. Memoirs like Tara Westover’s Educated and Jeanette Walls’s The Glass Castle follow this pattern closely: childhoods marked by abuse, neglect, or instability are reframed through the lens of hard-won self-actualization. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, and J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy similarly cast personal pain as a crucible for transformation. These stories aren’t false—but they are shaped. Structured. Smoothed into a redemptive form that both satisfies readers and reinforces the idea that suffering must earn its keep.
This pressure to redeem pain isn’t just a literary convention—it reflects something deeper in the culture. The critic Raymond Williams called it a structure of feeling: the shared emotional logic of a society, often unspoken, that tells us how we’re supposed to feel about work, success, love, grief—what emotions are acceptable, and which stories are allowed to matter. These structures don’t just shape individual behavior. They shape entire genres. They govern the emotional range of the possible.
And in a culture that demands resolution, the person who lingers in sadness—who lives inside ambiguity, who tells a story without a takeaway—becomes a kind of narrative threat. They interrupt the script. They disrupt the rhythm. They remind us that not all pain is legible, and not all wounds lead to wisdom.
But not everyone is willing to smooth out their story. Some people recognize that they’ve been handed a script—and choose not to follow it.
When the Shape No Longer Holds
When the story breaks, we’re left holding the pieces, wondering what we did wrong. We try to glue the arc back together, to force meaning from mess, to make our lives make sense to the people around us. But maybe the problem isn’t how the story ends. Maybe the problem is the shape we were given to begin with.
I had really hoped to finish this discussion in one essay, but as it turns out, there are a lot of complicated angles to consider. So, we’ll pick this up in the next installment, where we’ll consider some examples of public figures who step outside the frame entirely—those who refuse to perform the narrative they’ve been handed, or who are punished simply for being unreadable. What happens when the script no longer feels livable? What happens when you stop trying to be a character, and start becoming the author?
See you next week.