My “Before”

Tuesday 11 August 2026

We are on holiday. I am supposed to be doing AP Physics pre-course work. Instead, this morning, I finally chased the name I wrote down at the British Library in July: Kate McLean, the psychologist whose name kept coming up next to “narrative identity”.

I found she also has a WordPress (which I liked as I am also writing on the same platform): wp.wwu.edu/katemclean

She has a book… well she has several books and a ton of research papers. The book that caught my eye is The Co-authored Self: Family Stories and the Construction of Personal Identity. Oxford University Press, 2015.

I read the title three times before I read anything else.

The preview online lets you read the beginning. There is one sentence in the introduction that did something to me. She writes that “identity development is a collaborative construction between the individual and his or her narrative ecology” — and that “we share authorship of our identities with our parents, friends, siblings, and the storytelling culture that envelops us.”

She is writing about everyone. Every person. The idea that you don’t write your own identity by yourself, that you write it with other people, is true for everyone, and that’s how she means it.

But it is literally true for the people I’m trying to build something for. The people whose existence required other people. My existence was, very precisely, co-authored. By my dads. By a woman in Lancaster. By, in some way, other strangers whose names I don’t know. By California state law. By contracts. By choices.

I ordered the book on Amazon ten minutes after reading the preview. It arrives in London on the 21st. We get home on the 23rd, so the parcel will beat me to the front door by two days and wait on the mat. The two of us are travelling towards the same front door from different directions, which I find weirdly pleasing.

I don’t have my Post-Its here. I wrote two words on the back page of my holiday notebook and drew a box around them.

Co-Authored.

Maybe. I have only read the preview. But maybe.

— D.