our understanding of self and life no earlier than the age of two. Between five and seven, the content of those stories – including ideas about cultural roles, institutions and values – starts to merge with our sense of who we are and who we should be in society. We now have a model of our ‘cultural self.’ It’s during adolescence, according to the psychologist Professor Dan McAdams, that we start to understand our lives as a ‘grand narrative’. In order to help build this narrative, our memories of the past are shuffled and warped – edited as if by a canny screenwriter who’s turning us into a
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