http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/09/lauren_groff_s_fates_and_furies_reviewed_the_structural_trick_behind_the.html

Joan Didion’s famous maxim, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” places no particular value on the type of story we choose to tell. Is your life a tale of a little guy triumphing over hardship, or a saga of back-stabbing and injustice? Perhaps your story insists that a few committed souls have the power to triumph over the Man or that nice guys finish last. Whatever narrative order you impose on what Didion described as the “shifting phantasmagoria … which is our actual experience,” it will not only color that experience but inexorably shape it.