Nested Narratives: Biographical Accounts of Unlived Experience Across Three Narrative Orders

Studies of narrative identity have focused on positive formation: stories of ‘becoming’ who we are because of events that happened, people we met, and things that we said, did, or had. However, identities can also be negatively defined by things that we miss, lose, choose against, or events that never happened. Drawing on the sociology of nothing, this paper explores some ways in which biographical subjects may story their unlived lives and paths to unbecoming. We demonstrate this by analysing the same extract of data through three interpretive lenses, revealing different narrative orders: the intrapersonal, intertextual, and performative. Respectively, these refer to how nothing is narrated: self-reflexively by the experiencing subject, regarding a particular instance; as a sequence of thematically connected episodes, contextually emplotted within a general life story; and as a communicative act of telling, directed towards an imagined audience. Authors can move between these narrative orders, taking different temporal perspectives and producing ‘nested’ stories of alternative non-selves.


Introduction
Narrative identity is a concept used across the social sciences to explain how people construct, compose and tell stories of their selves over time.This reflects broader epistemological shifts in qualitative research, from realist to constructivist accounts (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011), historical to narrative truths (Spence, 1982,) and descriptive to performatively situated knowledge (Jackson, 2002).Life story methods, from oral history to biographical interviews and autoethnography, gather personal testimonies that reveal not only the substantive content of life but also the process and manner in which tales are told (Samuel and Thompson, 1990).The universal human tendency to order, structure, and make sense of subjective experience (Bruner, 1991) leads us to create stories of self-identity organised into meaningful episodes around personally significant themes (McAdams, 1993) and attempt to satisfy conventional notions of narrative coherence (Bruner, 2004).
Studies of narrative identity have focused on positive formation: stories of 'becoming' who we are because of events that happened, people we met, and things that we said, did, or had.However, identities can also be negatively defined by things that we miss, lose, choose against or events that never happened.Through a parallel process of reverse biographical identity work (Scott, 2019), we tell tales of unformed identities and paths to unbecoming.The sociology of nothing (Scott, 2018(Scott, , 2019(Scott, , 2020a(Scott, , 2020b) ) explores the meaning of such absences in worlds of lost experience.This combines two theoretical perspectives.Symbolic interactionism elucidates the micro-social processes through which 'nothing' happens, as encounters with others shape decisions not to act, dissuade people away from role identities, or impose obstacles to block their paths (cf. Becker, 1963).Phenomenology offers an interpretive understanding of nothing as a subjective experience.This concerns how people perceive and give meaning to negative social phenomena (no-things, non-events, no-body identities, and no-where places) in the realms of memory, imagination, and consciousness.Here, we are using the term 'negative' within the theoretical context of the sociology of nothing, rather than with the common sense, everyday meaning of unpleasurable valence (bad or unwanted experiences).
This article explores how different narrative frames shape how experiences of 'nothing' appear in biographical accounts.These interpretive lenses coexist, nested inside one another, creating a multi-layered narrative structure.Identity stories can be disrupted, deconstructed, and creatively reimagined.These ideas apply equally to negatively framed phenomena: stories of unbecoming, non-identity, and alternate non-realities.We shall demonstrate this by analysing the same extract of data through three interpretive lenses, revealing a set of nested narrative orders: the intrapersonal, intertextual, and performative.Respectively, these refer to how nothing is narrated: self-reflexively by the experiencing subject, regarding a particular instance; as a sequence of thematically connected episodes, contextually emplotted within a general life story; and as a communicative act of telling, directed towards an imagined audience.

Intrapersonal scripts
The first way of narrating nothing is as an account of a specific episode, rehearsed and reflected by the individual to themselves.Intrapersonal tales usually concern forms of 'nothingness' (the absence of something specific) rather than formless 'nothing' (the total absence of everything) (Green, 2011).Negative noema are empirically unreal objects and experiences that do not exist but hold subjectively significant meaning and can be classified into four types of symbolic social objects (Scott, 2020b).No-bodies include unmade or impossible versions of oneself, alongside missed or missing other people.No-things include actions not taken, possessions not acquired, secrets never told, or potential left untapped.Non-events are moments that never happened, disasters avoided, and lucky escapes.No-where places are sites of unbelonging, homesickness, and unfamiliar displacement (not to be confused with Augé's (1992) non-places, which are physically present but ambiguous, liminal sites).Methodologically, this invites an empirical, thematic analysis of the manifest content of self-stories.For example, across a sample of 28 tales, Scott (2019) identified five recurring themes: lost opportunities, silence, invisibility, emptiness, and stillness.
Drawing on Husserl's (1913) phenomenology, the term 'negative noesis' (Scott, 2019) describes the processes through which perceiving subjects relate to relevant unreal things.This involves various intentional acts, directed towards the negative symbolic objects from a perspectival standpoint.They reveal the individual's motivations, attitudes, and orientations towards that particular nothingness: how they think and feel about the matter absent from their lives.Husserl (1913) distinguished between perceptual acts of presentation (seeing real things directly) and presentification (imaginatively invoking, or 'making present' things that are empirically unreal).Presentifying acts include wishing, hoping, remembering, expecting, fantasising, missing, yearning, and rejecting.To this, Fink (1930) added the negative counterpart of depresentation: a prior stage of perceiving the empty background spaces from which objects may (not) emerge.Depresentifying acts include dreaming, grieving, wondering, clearing out, and pausing.
Noetic acts of the type outlined above can further be divided into commissive and omissive formulations (Scott, 2019).Respectively, people may understand their relational stance towards the object as expressing a conscious will (of themselves, others or circumstances) to refuse, reject, avoid, surrender, or destroy something particular and tangible, or a more passively arrived-at-default position of lack, neglect, deficiency, deprivation, or being without.Commissive and omissive intentionality can be mapped onto other phenomenological aspects of negation, such as embodiment (Scott, 2020b).An individual may report an experience of (commissively) injuring, damaging, or losing a part of their body, resulting in felt incapacity or (omissively) lacking corporeal substance that forecloses an alternate 'lived body' (Merleau-Ponty, 1945).The same applies to temporality: An individual may recall past choices made (commissively) against a course of action or an (omissively) lost opportunity that closed a future path.

Intertextual emplotment
The second way of composing stories about nothing is to emplot particular episodes within a broader life story (Ricoeur, 1980).This provides contextual meaning to an isolated instance (the negative noema described above) by interpreting its relevance to what came before or after in a cumulative sequence with consequential linkages (Polkinghorne, 1988).Just as Stanley (1993) argued that the lives of self and other are auto/biographically entwined, so too do chapters coalesce within an individual's story.For example, I make sense of a current relationship breakup within a grand, master narrative: it confirms my belief that 'people always let me down', or 'I will never find love'.Collapsing scattered moments into a telescopically connected thread creates a recursive, fractal effect (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2014: 95), whereby the same pattern seems iteratively to repeat.Emplotment is therefore a mechanism for imposing a sense of order, coherence and unified meaning upon a discontinuous self (Arstila andLloyd, 2014, cf. Bruner, 1991).
However, this masks the precarious contingency of subjective temporal lifeworlds.A self-story captured in one snapshot image is only provisionally true and easily supplanted by the next incoming moment (Jackson, 2010).Resisting this narrative instability, we anchor particular versions in place with 'the sense of an ending' (Ricoeur, 1980: 179, Kermode, 2007).The truth seems finally to emerge towards the latter stages of life, making sense of what has come before.As Brockmeier (2000) argues, retroactive composition confers teleological status on life stories, as the conclusion seems to confirm the prior trail of events.This is one of many attempts to make time stand still (Adam, 2004) and locate ourselves with an agency within a coherent structure.It often coincides with personal myths (McAdams, 1993), as narrators understand themselves to be the heroic protagonist around whom dramatic events revolve.Two common relational myths are the quests for power and intimacy (McAdams, 1993).Hindsight offers a morally charged perspectival framework for evaluating one's own conduct and finding lessons to be learned (Freeman, 1993).
Narrative identity is therefore a dynamic process of construction, despite the structured appearance of the end product.Subjects have the agentic capacity to change their self-narratives by moving between different temporal orders (Brockmeier, 2000), selecting and foregrounding some (non-)events while bracketing or sideshadowing (Morson, 1994) others.This capacity to assume different temporal perspectives, embedded in the habitual routines of everyday life, allows us to make and revise connections between different storied selves (Andrews, 2014).Similarly, Mishler (1992Mishler ( , 1999) ) points to the human capacity for perceiving the 'double arrow of time' by looking behind while surveying ahead: life is lived forwards but understood backwards (Kierkegaard, 1938(Kierkegaard, [1843]]).The past and future are ephemerally constructed, transient moments, between which the present is precariously suspended.

Performative communication
A third way of narrating nothing is with an audience in mind: tales told to others, including social researchers.The dialogic/performance approach considers to whom stories are directed, where, when, how, and for what purpose (Riessman, 2008).Qualitative inquiry involves interpreting narrative practice (Gubrium and Holstein, 2009): methods such as interviews unfold as situated encounters of interaction, through which two or more parties co-construct a joint version of reality (Denzin, 2003).Dramaturgical concerns of self-presentation and impression management shape the accounts that participants offer (Goffman, 1959), to particular and generalised others (Mead, 1934) and even alternative versions of oneself.As Polster (1995) argues, we inhabit a population of different, (im) possible selves, whose perspectival positions can be compared to those known through lived experience.
Interviewees might be concerned to convey a certain image or moral character, tailored to match the interviewer's anticipated judgments and reflected appraisals (Cooley, 1902).For example, Bittman and Pixley (1997) noticed how married couples worked up joint accounts of their domestic division of labour that contradicted the reality of each individual's lived experience.The pseudomutuality (Wynne et al., 1958) of dramaturgical team-mates to adhere to an official party line (Goffman, 1959) reveals an ethic of loyalty that keeps everyone in face.Even written stories, prepared in the safety and privacy of the backstage region (Goffman, 1959) are not immune to the effects of performative anticipation.Creative life writers occasionally address the imagined readers of their texts (Shaw, 1994) and Mass Observation Archive (MOA) Observers use their text to dialogue with an imagined 'other' in mind (Sheridan, 1993).Participants may be at pains to deliver a discursive account that teaches a message or moral lesson in line with wider social stories or dominant cultural scripts (Richardson, 1990).
Moreover, these tales are retold several times, on different occasions throughout the research process, ranging from fieldwork encounters to writing and representation (Hydén, 1995).Language and narration impose layers of interpretation so that we see life through a series of windows, in distorted, traceable forms (Denzin, 1991).This 'sedimentation' (Husserl, 1913) of first-and second-order constructs (Schütz, 1972) means that the finally emergent account offers narrative, not historical truth (Spence, 1982).Nevertheless, this does not imply a radical constructivist abandonment of the search for biographical meaning.Something of the original subjective experience remains in the account and can be known through phenomenological inquiry.

Method
As part of our larger project, Narratives of Nothing, which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2019-346), we conducted a secondary analysis of Mass Observation Archive (MOA) data.The MOA was established in 1937 and collects written, autobiographical accounts of the everyday experiences and attitudes of ordinary people living in Britain (Sheridan, 1993).The MOA sends out three 'Directives' a year about various topics to an established panel of over 500 volunteer 'Observers'.Each of the Directives is structured around a short list of guiding questions and/or prompts.Observers can choose which Directives they respond to, and how; handwritten, typed, and electronic accounts are all accepted.
Our project was approved by our institution's ethical review board.Key issues to consider were anonymity, confidentiality, data storage, and re-use (Corti and Thompson, 2004;Heaton, 2004).The MOA Observers are asked not to identify themselves or others in their responses, and consent to all necessary permissions before they begin writing.MOA give them a respondent identifier code, made up the first letter of their surname and a number: for example, A123.Most of the documents are stored as hard copies at The Keep archive at the University of Sussex, but some have been digitalised and are available to read online.
Given the limits to representativeness and generalisability of biographical data (Gobo, 2004), together with practical time constraints (Smith, 2008), we adopted a purposeful sampling strategy.We selected seven Directives on the broad topics of relationships and social experiences that promised to include negative experiences and so seemed potentially relevant.These were 'Belonging' (Summer Directive 2010), 'Dear 16-Year-Old Me' (Summer Directive 2015), 'Close Relationships' (Summer Directive 1990), 'Sex' (Autumn Directive 2005), 'Courting and Dating' (Summer Directive 2001), 'Siblings' (Summer Directive 2012), and 'Going to University' (Spring Directive 2004).All of these archived data were stored as paper documents at The Keep.Nina Lockwood selected a sub-sample of responses from each Directive by taking two consecutive letters from the participant identifiers, moving alphabetically from A-P (rather than A-N due to there being no responses from participant identifiers beginning with D or I).This created a sample of 46 individual Observer responses: ('Belonging': n = 10; 'Dear 16-Year-Old Me': n = 5; 'Close relationships': n = 16; 'Sex': n = 7; 'Courting and Dating': n = 1; '"Going to University': n = 4; 'Siblings': n = 3).The sample comprised 34 female and 12 males, with ages ranging from 30 to 99 years.Thirtyeight respondents scored 'low' on an index of social and economic deprivation.Although questions persist concerning the Observer panel's bias towards older, middle-class people (Pollen, 2013), this demographic group is well-placed to provide longer-term accounts of experience over the life course.
We conducted an inductive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) of the 46 narrative accounts.We then selected a single illustrative case to study for the purpose of this article.From the limited demographic information available, we know that this Observer, whom we call Emma, was a married woman, aged 53, living in the south of England.Responding to the Directive on 'Belonging', she wrote about her experiences at school, where she had struggled both to make friends and to have her academic ability recognised.In the following sections, we show how this same personal story can be analysed in three different but equally convincing ways, through each of the interpretive lenses: intrapersonal scripts, intertextual emplotment, and performative communication.

Unbelonging in a no-where place
First, we present an analysis of the data extract as an intrapersonal script.As outlined above, this means reading the story as a limited and self-contained, recollected account of a specific empirical episode, and focusing on the manifest content that is described.The author reveals their perception and understanding of a particular negative noema, such as a no-body figure, no-thing object, non-event moment, or no-where place.The phenomenological researcher conducts a thematic analysis of the noetic processes by which the subject relates intentionally towards this negative symbolic social object, in terms of their motivations, attitudes, and emotions.A key consideration is whether they believe that they acted commissively or omissively in making nothing happen.
Emma's account was a tale of unbelonging to her secondary school environment, which could be classified as a no-where place.When she reflected back upon this time, she remembered a lonely, alienating institution filled with brisk, uncaring people with whom she had little in common.We distinguished two ways in which Emma's feeling of unbelonging manifest: in relation to her peer group of schoolgirls, from whom she felt estranged and excluded, and in her sense of temporal displacement in the wrong historical era.
First, Emma described how she had enjoyed a feeling of belonging in early childhood.This positive ideal provided a benchmark standard against which to compare her current situation: belonging is about being in a familiar, comfortable place, with people who love, like and understand me . . .However, if an unpleasant feature is present also, or replaces one of the other features, then one may lose the sense of belonging.
Emma recalled being sent to a secondary modern school, having failed the Eleven Plus examination.She believed that this test did not accurately measure her academic ability, and so felt out of place among less intellectually strong peers.The everyday experience of this unfolded through interactions in the classroom (Delamont, 2017), where teachers treated her differently and other pupils kept their distance: I did not fit in and was bullied.Because I was far ahead of almost everyone else in the class, I had to be given special work that was different from what the others were doing.
The same feelings of difference emerged through social encounters in other no-where places.On the sports field, Emma was aware of being physically smaller and less confident than her peers.When picking teams, she was 'always left to the end because no one wanted to choose me'.She felt shy and 'intimidated' by a generalised perception of the Competent Other (Scott, 2007), as most 'normal' girls seemed to know the unspoken rules of social behaviour.Emma's relationally defined self-image, viewed from the imagined perspective of others, fits with two key models of dialogical selfhood: Mead's (1934) internal conversation between the subject 'I' and object 'Me', and Cooley's (1902) Looking Glass Self of reflected appraisals.Another no-where place was the school bus, which promised symbolically to transport Emma back to her sites of belonging but threatened to leave her stranded: 'I was afraid that I might get on the wrong bus by mistake and go to a strange place and never be able to find my way home'.Finally, Emma felt conspicuously different in the evenings and weekends because she declined to enter leisure spaces that her peer group enjoyed.Whereas the other girls, were interested in fashion, make-up, boyfriends, parties and discotheques. . .I had no interest in any of this, but I was acutely aware that people would think I 'ought' to be doing all this, and I felt as if there was something wrong with me because I did not.
Emma's noetic intentionality towards these negative symbolic social objects could be interpreted as omissive.From the perspectival standpoint of the normative school environment, she regarded herself to be lacking certain socially desirable characteristics.Although she did not particularly wish to be like her peers, she did want to experience the feeling of belonging that such status would confer.Similarly, although she resented her academic ability being unappreciated, she wished to belong elsewhere with more capable peers.The school appeared as a no-where place because it omitted to recognise and include her.She felt ignored and invisible because there was no symbolic social space from which she could emerge and manifest.
Second, Emma reported a feeling of temporal displacement through unbelonging to the historical period in which she lived.Reflecting on her younger self, she noticed that 'the modern world' of Western consumer culture, which so enticed her peers, held no appeal to her and was an object of distaste.Instead, Emma felt more drawn towards the traditional values of Victorian society.She performed biographical time work (Flaherty, 2003) by imaginatively travelling towards this distant temporal horizon and positioning herself upon it.From this perspectival standpoint, the two historical eras appeared as nowhere places with different associational meanings.This shaped Emma's present sense of relational selfhood as based on marginality and exclusion: I did not like the modern world and I did not want to grow up.I had always had a feeling of wanting to be Victorian, and this became very strong when I was a teenager.I felt at odds with the whole society. . .I knew then that I was not the same as other people, that I was an outsider and that I did not belong.
Emma expressed different noetic intentional attitudes towards the two temporal locations.The Victorian era appeared as an object of wishing, longing and yearning: a nowhere place to which she imagined fitting in, being recognised and included.If only she could reach this place, she might finally find that elusive sense of belonging.Nostalgically, Emma longed to recapture a past that remained out of reach, there-and-then instead of here-and-now (Wilson, 2015).Meanwhile, the contemporary era appeared as an object of distaste, rejection and repudiation.Emma disidentified with the values she saw in its face and sought to remove herself from its tainted orbit.These affective motivations informed her commissive act of eschewing her current temporal location: I did not just dislike modern society but disapproved of it in many ways.I disapproved of the materialism, the shallow values, the frivolity, the lack of spiritual awareness, the vulgarity, general noise, dirt, ugliness, haste, aggression, rudeness and insensitivity.

Sequences of nothing: double-arrowed telescopes
Next, we present an analysis of the same data extract as a case of intertextual emplotment.This involves zooming out to widen the experiential terrain included in the narrative viewfinder, changing from a short, snapshot frame to a longer-lens perspective (Scott et al., 2016).Specific instances and episodes are contextually embedded within the broader life-story as a meaningful whole.The analytical focus is on how cumulative sequences of (negative) life events are composed and configured around a central organising theme.This might be the core belief or personal myth (McAdams, 1993) that the author believes lies at the heart of their life-story.
The temporal directionality of self-narratives is a flexible property that authors can manipulate.Along the double arrow of time (Mishler, 2006), subjects can look forwards or back, viewing their lives prospectively or retrospectively.They may use two corresponding acts of temporal presentification: retention (perceptions of past, lost, or remembered moments that are 'no longer') and protention (perceptions of future, imagined, or hypothetical moments that are 'not yet') (Husserl, 1913).Embedded in biography, temporal directionality can inform the affective tone of a life-story.Lieblich et al. (1998) identified two common narrative forms: progressive (tales of development, movement or becoming) and regressive (tales of loss, decline and failure).
In narratives of nothing, these perspectives can be combined into two hybrid forms.The first is what we call a progressively regressive narrative.These are stories that tell how a cumulative sequence of connected non-events led the subject further towards a negatively framed identity, often through acts of omission.For example, an individual may recount a series of job losses that seem to confirm that they 'do not belong in the workplace' or 'will never find my vocation'.Such tales are often infused with a negative affective tone, expressing counterfactual emotions of sadness, regret, envy or guilt (Scott, 2020a).The second hybrid form is the regressively progressive narrative, which tells of how a subject moved further away from an unwanted identity, often through acts of commission.For example, an individual might account for their non-participation in consumer culture by listing the lifestyle practices they have chosen to eschew.These tales may be infused with a positive affective tone, expressing counterfactual emotions of pride, relief and happiness.Storytellers can navigate between these two hybrid perspectives by moving along their inner timeline and redirecting their investigatory gaze.Narrative acts of transposition, flipping, switching and reversal can turn a progressively regressive narrative into a regressively progressive one, and vice versa.

Progressively regressive storyline
First, looking back over her life, Emma told a tale punctuated by multiple experiences of unbelonging to various social groups.This cumulative sequence of omissive encounters contributed to her growing sense of alienation from mainstream society and of being different from 'normal' people.As Emma's story evolved, this initially global and generalised view was directed towards and focused on the two specific issues outlined above: peer group exclusion and historical displacement.
Presenting a chronological series of connected episodes, Emma built a narrative of regressive movement towards her marginalised status.She wrote, 'the first feeling I had of not belonging was when I went to infant school at the age of five' (emphasis added), before describing the 'real sense of not belonging' (emphasis added) that developed at secondary school, where she 'did not fit in and was bullied. . .It was a miserable time'.By positioning these time periods in ascendant order, Emma conveyed an escalating awareness of never fitting in.The affective tone sustained a dejected tenor, laced with feelings of bitterness, envy and regret.Emma's eventual self-identification as an 'outsider' in early adulthood provides an apparent endpoint to the journey, supporting developmental perspectives on teleological causality and retrospective coherence (Brockmeier, 2000;Habermas and Bluck, 2000).Arriving at this station by omissive default, Emma created a provisional conclusion to this version of her story.

Regressively progressive storyline
However, with hindsight, that moment turned out to be only the end of the first chapter.Halfway through Emma's story, she made a transpositional manoeuvre, switching her narrative around to a regressively progressive form.She used the previous conclusion as a 'jumping off point' for a second chapter, conveying different meanings that appeared in reverse.Early adulthood became a pivotal turning point (Strauss, 1969(Strauss, [1959]]), after which Emma stopped caring so much about the judgements of others.She redefined the meaning of her outsider status, replacing instances of omissive exclusion with commissive choices and decisions.The new affective tone was positive, as feelings of disappointment, fear, and stigma gave way to expressions of selfacceptance, security, and pride.
Emma began positively to seek out other people who also identified as 'outcasts' and formed new relationships.These acts of transgressive identification (McAdams and Bowman, 2001) served to redeem and re-author the self.For example, Emma described getting married when she was twenty years old to a man who 'turned out to be "peculiar" in the same way I was, so we belonged together!'Similarly, she recalled making a few friends with people who 'did not fit in "normal" society, like me!' In the reflected appraisals (Cooley, 1902) of her new, chosen significant others (Mead, 1934), Emma found validation and acceptance, which afforded her relief.Thus, Emma moved further and further away from the no-where place of mainstream, conventional identities that she defiantly rejected.Proudly reclaiming her stigmatised labels, Emma expressed contentment that she had reached somewhere in which she finally belonged: It is a wonderful feeling to find out that you are not mad or stupid or odd after all, and that there is somewhere where other people accept you. . .I have been able to find a husband and friends whose general outlook and values are sufficiently similar to my own for me to be able to feel safe and secure and have the sense of belonging that I do.

Performing unbelonging
Our third way of analysing Emma's story is as a narrative practice, displaying versions of herself towards different audiences (Gubrium and Holstein, 2009).As outlined above, these imagined figures include alternate versions of oneself, particular others, or generalised others.The narrator may hold different intentional meanings in relation to each of these addressed recipients (Goffman, 1981).Respectively, these could be exploring and comparing the parallel trajectories of actual and unlived experience; communicating directly with an imagined reader or social researcher; and aligning oneself with or against wider social stories and normative cultural scripts.
Beginning with alternate versions of the self, Emma's account showed some movement between different positions and voices.Phenomenologically, these characters or personae are noetic figures whom the author-self invokes.The polysemic and multivocal texture of stories, as dynamic, communicative tools (Bakhtin, 1981;Jackson, 2002) can unfold within internal, introspective dialogues between multiple subjectivities (Josselson, 2009).Life writing research methods are especially conducive and facilitative to the emergence of this creative, playful process.The private context of diary writing in general, and the deep level of trust and confidentiality offered by MOA in particular, may have a liberating effect by providing a safe space to accommodate the many selves who populate the inner world (Polster, 1995).In apprehending this void, the narrator performs an act of depresentation (Fink, 1930): clearing out and opening up an empty space from which hidden figures might emerge.
Emma recalled encounters with significant others (Mead, 1934) who had shaped her identity as a deviant outsider.Now questioning these external attributions, she began to contemplate alternate readings of herself.Instead of being blameworthy, she turned into a victim, both at the hands of schoolgirl bullies and through her mother's disapproval: '[she] was always telling me that I was odd and silly, that I had silly ideas and silly ways and that people would think that I was strange'.From this perspective, a misunderstood soul took refuge in the escapist worlds of books, academia and Victoriana.Perhaps she viewed the MOA Directives similarly, as a safely distant and socially removed landscape, unpopulated by real people and their critical judgements.Paradoxically, perceiving an audience of absents -a faceless mass of no-body figures -may have facilitated communicative self-expression.
Diary-form responses can make it easier for participants to discuss sensitive topics, compared to the relatively confrontational format of face-to-face biographical interviews (Kenten, 2010;Markham and Couldry, 2007;Spowart and Nairn, 2014).This may be because of the lack of direct accountability to an immediately present audience.Emma's written narrative featured occasional ventures beyond empirical recollections into the transcendent realms of fantasy, spirituality and side-shadowed darker worlds.First, she felt safe enough to disclose that as a young adult she had suffered 'a nervous breakdown and completely cracked up' -a courageously vulnerable act, given the stigma that surrounded mental illness at the time.Second, Emma described how, as a teenager, she 'began to have many psychic experiences.I had paranormal experiences, precognitive dreams, and would have visions at night, before I fell asleep'.Perhaps Emma made these journeys into alternate realms as a means of experimenting with her unmade, unlived selves and imagining who else she could have become.
Emma's account recognises both particular and generalised imagined others.First, we noticed some points at which she appeared to consider and address the reader's perspective.In a previous analysis of MOA Observers' feedback, Shaw (1994) found that panellists reported holding an image of the archivist in mind while writing, and this fantasy figure may have shaped the composition of their accounts.The archivist was typically believed to be a calm, quiet, studious, and intellectual woman (Shaw, 1994), who represented an interested, accepting and trustworthy confidante.If Emma held such ideas about her particular audience, this might explain why she presented an intellectual persona, highlighting her educational qualifications and mourning the lost potential of a thwarted academic career.By aligning herself with the reader as a fellow inhabitant of this world, Emma found comfort in a shared sense of belonging.
The generalised others whom Emma addressed appeared obliquely, through references to cultural norms, trends, and lifestyles that she declined to join.We have already seen how the eschewal of teenage girls' fashion, music, and partying was the negative counterpart against which Emma's constructed her sense of difference, otherness but also autonomous integrity.An affective tone of pride infused Emma's reflections on this time as having cultivated her emerging authenticity.She disdainfully considered the other groups she could have joined and the existential freedom that she exercised in choosing against that unwanted fate (Yalom, 1980): When we went to the polytechnic, we were suddenly liberated from the stupid atmosphere of petty-minded materialistic carping and badgering into an intelligent, intellectual environment.

Discussion
This tripartite analysis has demonstrated how narrative shapes the interpretative meanings of lost, unlived experience.The same source material can be understood in different ways according to the narrative lens through which it is viewed.This is not to posit the radical social construction of subjective reality, but simply to acknowledge that we can never get beyond the discursive life-as-told.Emma's story is particular in content but not unique in frame and form: we could have chosen any other case and presented three comparably structured accounts.This highlights the ambiguity that plagues life story research in the quest for order and coherence (McAdams, 2006a).On the one hand, we see the ineluctable power of narrative to humanise lived time (Carr, 1986), but on the other hand, this is illusory and precariously contingent.
Reflective reconstructions may take a 'nested' form, whereby alternate narrative orders are arranged in a parallel, stacked structure so that their multiple realities align.Rather than choosing between three (or more) rival explanations to determine which comes closest to subjective truth, we can hold one interpretive lens in mind while simultaneously exploring others.This implies a quantum model of epistemology through relative superposition: all stories are potentially true and equally convincing, each creating its own internal logic and universe of meaning.Thus, the relationship between narrative orders is contemporary and complementary.Emma's story could be told in all three ways (intrapersonally, intertextually, and performatively) at the same time, without any one version disputing another.
The nesting effect also occurs within each of the narrative orders, in the individualised telling of identity tales.Through processes of time work (Flaherty, 2003) and time travel (Andrews, 2014), subjects can narrate a coherent story through one main interpretive lens but still move flexibly between positions that redirect their view.Consequently, they can adopt a shifting, multi-perspectival stance while retaining and claiming stable personal truths, such as the myths, memes, and morals that come to characterise life.Selfauthorship therefore combines provisional uncertainty in the continuous lived moment (Polkinghorne, 1988) with sporadic pockets of reflective knowledge that emerge in foreand hindsight.In Emma's account, nesting can be observed across three biographical dimensions: directional length, meaningful depth, and communicative breadth.
First, within the intrapersonal narrative order, Emma adopted a long lens perspective by moving backwards and forwards along a biographical timeline.She narrated experiences of unbelonging through relational non-connection and temporal displacement, which occurred in discrete episodes at different stages of her life.She was able not only to recall moments from the past from the perspective of her younger self but also to project herself into the future, anticipating better times ahead.She simultaneously practised negative retention and negative protention, by holding and comparing visions of being 'no longer' and 'not yet' (Husserl, 1913).Folding these alternate temporal positions into her current standpoint in the present, Emma imposed fleeting points of fixity, viewing 'there-and-then's from a situated 'here-and-now'.This created transient but functional endings, which expired as soon as they were told.
Second, within the intertextual narrative order, Emma moved up and down between sedimented layers of meaningful depth.Zooming in and out gave her a telescopic perspective on the fractalness of time: She perceived recursive patterns in a sequence of chronological life experiences that appeared to repeat a common theme.Emma emplotted particular noema-isolated episodes and specific examples of unbelonging -within a deep-rooted, enduring script that rippled and reverberated throughout her life.A central personal myth (McAdams, 1993) formed the coherent thread around which noetic satellites revolved: 'I am always an outsider and I struggle to belong'.This formed a general life story, which connected disparate pieces of 'evidence' and made retrospective sense.Even the inflection points of plot twists and narrative flips could be folded into an internally coherent story.For example, the transposition from progressive regressive to regressive progressive sense-making and accompanying shift in counterfactual emotional tone from shame to pride could be read as a heroic redemption narrative (McAdams, 2006b).Thus, while adopting a multi-perspectival stance between levels of autobiography, Emma was able to retain a coherent thread of self-identity and confirm her own narrative truth.
Third, within the performative narrative order, Emma's story was communicated to a multiplicity of imagined audiences.She took into account various perspectives and addressed different voices as she anticipated the ways in which the presentation of her (un-)belonging selves could be perceived.These noetic audience figures emerged into relevance and disappeared from view at different temporal stages of the recounted life story.Thus, Emma remembered the family, friends, and teachers who comprised her social networks on the occasions of past episodes; projectively imagined MOA archivists in the immediate present and academic readers in the future; and drew upon wider cultural scripts to position herself as (mis)aligned across the entire temporal arc.This raises the question of how Emma might have composed her account differently for other times and audiences, selecting fresh material or leaving some parts out.Indeed, how might other narrators have directed their stories towards completely different sets of minds?Identity storytelling is not simply a process of applying a universalised, general template, but rather an infinite array of performative acts, each situated in a unique communicative context.

Conclusion
The narrative truth of a life-as-told (Bruner, 1987) is socially contingent, constructing interactively mediated routes towards becoming.However, non-identity stories are equally provisional, unstable, and negotiable, producing alternate unmade selves.This paper has explored how the lived experience of having, doing, or being 'nothing' appears in biographical accounts, as different narrative orders provide alternate interpretive lenses.This produces storied accounts with a 'nested' narrative structure, whereby different narrative frames are arranged in multi-layered alignment, forming recursive shapes and patterns.
The nesting effect can be observed both between and within three narrative orders: the intrapersonal, intertextual, and performative.We demonstrated this by analysing the same data extract through each interpretive lens and presenting alternate iterations and retellings of the story.Emma's experience of nothingness could be convincingly narrated as substantive intrinsically meaningful content, the connective thread emplotting a personal myth or a self-representational act directed towards imagined audiences.Each of these versions promises epistemological validity, through its own internal logic and narrative coherence.Yet, none of them can definitively reveal the original, subjective meaning of the unmade life-as-lived (Bruner, 1987).Narrative enchants us with the illusion of anchorage but simultaneously uproots us as it misleads and obscures.