The Story of Your Life

One of Chicago Review of Books’s 12 Must-Read Books of August 2026
One of The Globe and Mail’s 36 Best New Books of Summer
One of Lit Hub’s 10 Great Nonfiction Titles to Read This August
One of The New York Times’s 22 Books Coming in August
One of Marie Claire’s 17 Must-Read Books Coming in August 2026

“Breezily inquisitive . . . [with] intellectual generosity . . . Jezer-Morton offers long, beautiful passages on ambivalence, one of the shady human emotions that social media—with its bright performative hits, its ‘journeys’ and its insistence on redemption—fails to capture. Her book is hopeful and unscolding. It will make you think twice about putting in the extra work on vacation to show your Close Friends just how happy and relaxed you are.”
—The New York Times

“A thought-provoking analysis on what exactly we’re doing with all our many hours of screen time—namely, how and why we share, consume, and experience life through social media. Through rigorous research and interviews with ordinary people, culture journalist Kathryn Jezer-Morton tracks the evolution of our social-media habits and probes the impulse that keeps them alive. The desire to document our lives is innately human, but what happens when the scaffolding of life itself is built solely to be documented online?”
—Harper’s Bazaar

“New York Magazine columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton attempts to unglue our phones from our hands long enough for us to step back and think about how the last decade online has warped how we share—and even live—our lives.”
—Marie Claire

“The Story of Your Life is an adept exploration of these algorithmically-driven platforms and the ways in which their rules dictate not just the way we share information but also shape the content itself. Journalist and New York magazine columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton brings together deep research, thoughtful interviews, and her own history to question why we share so much of ourselves through social media and what happens when our stories are only told through passing posts online.”
—Chicago Review of Books

“The Cut columnist Jezer-Morton debuts with a shrewd analysis of how social media has restricted the stories people tell about themselves and others.”
—The Millions

“[Jezer-Morton] draws on research and interviews to make the case that platforms like Instagram and TikTok haven’t just shaped how we tell our life stories over the past two decades, they’ve also determined which moments we choose to record, share, and remember.”
—The Globe and Mail

“It is neither complicated nor controversial to suggest that social media is bad for us. But why? And how has it shaped us, as both individuals and a culture over the past 20 years? With answers to these questions (and so much more) comes Jezer-Morton’s deeply researched and intimately reported examination of how the very public stories we tell about ourselves have become inextricable from our innermost personal narratives.”
—Lit Hub

“Kathryn Jezer-Morton is invaluable: one of our greatest chroniclers of the norms of American domestic life, one of our most astute interpreters of performance and gloss. The Story of Your Life is an essential study of the ordinary use of social media—it’s poignant and easygoing and never preachy, and crucially, it’s focused on people who exist outside over-dissected coastal norms. Jezer-Morton is utterly free of defensive postures and self-righteousness, averse to the cynicism about others and false innocence about the self that defines so much of the internet—yet she’s always a sharp, generous critic of these very things. This book is a classic in the critical project of relating surface to structure, and a milestone work on what’s lost when our narrative imagination is disciplined into a rigid, optimized, phone-shaped norm.”
—Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror

“Whenever I want to think more carefully about something in my online world that annoys or fascinates me, I go to Kathryn Jezer-Morton. She’s a trenchant analyst who’s also a nuance queen—and The Story of Your Life is Jezer-Morton operating at the height of her (tremendous) powers.”
—Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even and Out of Office

“An unexpectedly moving look at how algorithmic social platforms shape not just our tastes but our capacity to discern and process our own experiences, and imagine the boundaries of our possible futures. The Story of Your Life manages to both alarm and reassure, exposing social media’s power over us while reminding us that storytelling—the medium humans have always relied on for survival—is endlessly resilient.”
—Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less and Filterworld

“A shrewd analysis of how social media has restricted the stories people tell about themselves and others. . . . The author balances her account with humor . . . she offers incisive critiques, most notably about the hidden economic power at work; these ‘tales of resilience and triumph,’ she explains, function to hide increasing economic disparity: ‘We are telling these stories as proof that we can thrive in an economic order that has largely left ordinary people behind.’ It’s a thought-provoking interrogation of what goes unposted and why.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Smart, sharply observed analysis . . . This fascinating portrait of social media is essential for understanding how tech companies shape how we share, talk about, and make sense of our own lives. A lively, irreverent journey.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Jezer-Morton smartly combines the personal with the political in this analysis of social media—part memoir, part ethnography, and part speculation . . . A compelling, accessible synthesis of philosophy and personal narrative, exploring how users conform to social media’s logic, which encourages the flattening of nuance, whimsy, and the understanding of a good life.”
—Library Journal