The Stories of Your Life: The Eight Masterplots That Explain Human Behaviour

by Ben Ambridge

From internationally bestselling author Ben Ambridge, The Stories of Your Life shares fascinating lessons about the nature of humanity, the power of psychology and – most importantly – the way we see ourselves.

We understand the world through stories. All of our experiences, all of our insights – psychologically, we interpret them through specific lenses that have been curated, perfected and passed down throughout human history. Professor Ben Ambridge has quantified those lenses into eight distinct masterplots that can apply to any experience.

The mother who wakes up an hour early every day to prep her child's breakfast? She's playing out the Sacrifice plot. The amateur sports team who go on to win the big trophy against all the odds? They're part of the Underdog narrative.

Ambridge uses examples from fiction, real life, and popular psychology research to demonstrate how we not only naturally gravitate towards the masterplot narratives, but how we actually use those narratives to manipulate the world around us – like the addict who uses the Monster plot to paint their illness as something to overcome, or the boxer who relies on the Revenge narrative to motivate themselves to fight their way back after an embarrassing defeat.

These masterplots do more for us than to help us understand the world; they’re vehicles through which humans have survived.

288 pages, Hardcover

Published September 5, 2024

Reviews

[El Zet · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a bit of an odd one. On one hand, it’s super entertaining, but on the other, it feels overly curated to include only examples that conveniently back up the thesis. And even those examples can be pretty shaky—like in the chapter about the Quest. One person joins a walk as a personal challenge, another has a psychotic episode and interprets it as a call to action. Someone who just wants to visit X number of countries for the sake of it isn’t comparable to a character (real or fictional) who has to travel because their goal can only be achieved somewhere specific.

The second example illustrates my main issue with the book: it completely sidesteps the idea that we spot patterns and assign meaning because the same masterplot gets repeated endlessly in every piece of media we consume and we see it as a reflection of reality. That’s not just an interesting quirk of storytelling—it’s a phenomenon that fuels addiction, destructive habits, and manipulation, because the good needs to triumph, the underdog is supposed to have their comeuppance, and things will be fair.

I didn’t expect it to cover every angle or get super deep—it’s meant to be more entertaining—but it felt too shallow and the chapters too disconnected for me to really enjoy it.

[Alison · Rating 2 out of 5]

If I wasn't an English teacher, author or librarian, I might actually find this book more interesting, the problem was, it was everything I already knew about stories, plots and how many authors created their storylines. The audio too was a little dry in the reading. I think if you are learning about how stories are created then this book would be good, just for those in the know, nothing new or insights here.

[Μίλτος Τρ. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Απρόσμενα ευχάριστο και πολύ κατατοπιστικό βιβλίο για την ανάγκη του ανθρώπου να ζει συγκεκριμένα αφηγήματα και τους ψυχολογικούς λόγους που τα χρειάζεται.