The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything by Kathryn Jezer-Morton (Preorder)

Release date: August 4th, 2026

An eye-opening and intimate look at how social media shapes our entire lives, from the writer Jia Tolentino calls “one of our greatest chroniclers of the norms of American domestic life” 

Over the past two decades, platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok have revolutionized how we document and share information about our lives. Social media is where our history lives now.

In The Story of Your Life, journalist and New York columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton examines how these algorithm-driven platforms change not only how we share our experiences but how we feel about the experiences themselves. What stories do we choose to tell, and how do these choices reflect and shape our evolving identities?

Through rigorous research and wide-ranging interviews with everyday people, Jezer-Morton explores how the platforms on which we have told our life stories for the past twenty years have determined what those stories have come to look and sound like. Today our attention spans are short, and our stories reflect that, with spectacle and exaggeration playing ever-larger roles in our accounts of our experiences. By examining how we share, talk, and post about our milestones, vacations, homes, relationships, hardships, politics, and more, Jezer-Morton shows just how pervasive and influential our social media platforms have become in how we view ourselves and what we consider to be a life well lived.