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stories are the building blocks of human experience. They are the essential ingredients in the melange that we call the “self”; they are the guideposts for our interaction with others; and they are the fuel for the engine that drives one of the most dominant human institutions—the law.

Like scientific discoveries, stories show us ways to cope with error and surprise in our daily lives. And those stories that are widely circulated become “collective coins” that begin to illuminate our world by revealing
alternative ones.

The glue that binds us to the courts is simply the old-fashioned storytelling that permeates lawyers’ arguments; the use of “garden variety narratives” in legal pleadings is the “common person’s portal into the arcane realm of law.

Because law and narrative are so inextricably interwoven, law can never be
isolated from our perceptions of the world. Our perceptions of life find expression in stories.

"There is no such thing,” he says, “as an intuitively obvious and essential
self to know, one that just sits there ready to be portrayed in words.” Rather, the self is a constantly evolving conglomeration of our internal and external experiences. And because so much of our experience is formed through listening to and telling stories, selfhood and narrative are inextricably interlinked

“self” is something that we must continu-
ally tell ourselves and others about before it can be understood. We tell and retell the arc of our lives in narrative form, because narrative is how we make sense of interactions with others, and it is our natural way of identifying and talking about expectations that have gone awry.

Because we exist and interact in human cultures, how we tell stories about
ourselves depends in large part on our assessment of how we are viewed by others

It turns out, then, that self, which we associate with autonomy and free
will, “is also other.”