In the almost two decades since McAdams made that claim, evidence has accumulated to support the idea that, alongside our goals and values and character traits, our personal narratives reflect a stable aspect of our personalities. (McAdams labels these three aspects of the self the “Personological Trinity”).

Other work also has illustrated the significance of the idea of self-stories as part of personality, since the way we tell our personal stories turns out to have implications for our mental health and overall wellbeing. For instance, if you’re the kind of person who would remember the positives that came out of that (hypothetical) bullying episode at your new school, it’s also more likely that you enjoy a greater sense of wellbeing and satisfaction in life. Moreover, this raises the tantalising possibility that changing your self-authoring style and focus could be beneficial – indeed, helping people to re-interpret their personal stories in a more constructive light is the basis of what’s known as “narrative therapy”. The red book in your head is not the final edition. Modify your story as you tell it, and perhaps you can change the kind of person you are.

But what are the different styles of narrating our lives? When it comes to describing people’s character traits – the conventional way of thinking about personality – the most widely supported and researched theory in the field suggests that, from the thousands of trait terms in the English language, there can be distilled a “Big Five” (including extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism and so on) that capture the essence of each individual.

And, it seems, our life stories similarly have main features by which each of us can be defined. Research has measured a “dizzying” range of different aspects of people’s personal stories, including (and as first compiled by McLean’s collaborator Jonathan Adler): “agency, communion, valence, redemption, contamination, closure, coherence (at least three kinds), exploratory processing, growth goals, integrative and intrinsic memories, positive and negative meaning-making, elaboration, sophistication, accommodative processing, differentiated processing, ending valence, affective processing, intimacy, foreshadowing, complexity”.