It’s a mistake to visualize the narrative arc I was handed in school—inciting incident, rising action, crisis, climax, falling action, resolution, denouement—and to try to map my life onto it. It’s a mistake to lay that shape over my lived experience, like a transparency the teacher would align over a worksheet, projected, so we could watch her write on it. It is a mistake to ask oneself, Is this falling action? Is this crisis? Plot is what happened, and what happened is one thing. What the book—the life—is about is another thing entirely.
