The study of narrative identity—the ongoing process of authoring our life stories and being shaped by them—has provided a rich conceptualization of adult personality, yielding important insights about the storied nature of meaning-making in personality, particularly for young and midlife adults. However, little research has been done to investigate narrative identity in older adulthood, potentially resulting in a constrained understanding of narrative identity across the life span. I propose that much-needed research on narrative identity in late life could substantiate or undermine a hypothesized shift in emphasis from authoring to reading life stories (McAdams, 2015), complicate and refine the master narrative framework (McLean & Syed, 2015), and offer new targets for narrative identity questions across the entire life span.
The last chapters of life: A proposed research agenda for studying narrative identity in older adulthood
