The Life Chronicler
Project

The interview process consists of several category-based questions. Some are broken down into sub-questions. While the questions are framed in such a way as to invoke contemporaneous ​ responses, the first question will require time to reflect and compose. Therefore, I have published that question below so you will be prepared when we meet.

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Credit for this question goes to Dr. Dan P. McAdams, Northwestern University, as written in his paper, "The Life Story Interview - II," published in 2007.

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Please begin by thinking about your life as if it were a book or a novel. Imagine that the book has a table of contents containing the titles of the main chapters in the story. To begin here, please describe very briefly what the main chapters in the book might be. Please give each chapter a title, tell me just a little bit about what each chapter means, and say a word or two about how we get from one chapter to the next.

 

As a storyteller here, what you want to do is to give me an overall plot summary of your story, going chapter by chapter. You may have as many chapters as you want, but I would suggest having no fewer than 2 and no more than 7 of them. We will want to spend no more than about 40 minutes on this first section of the interview, so please keep your descriptions of the chapters relatively brief.