An adult life is a slowly emerging design, with shifting components, occasional dramatic disruptions, and fresh creative arrangements.

Adulthood, on this view, is less a straight road than a piece of work that takes shape gradually, the way a pattern appears in a weaving. Nobody gets the finished plan at twenty-one. Jobs, relationships, places and beliefs are the parts, and they keep changing. Sometimes something breaks suddenly, such as a loss, a move or a collapse of plans, and the person has to arrange the pieces again, this time with more imagination than before.

Conway was a historian and memoirist who moved from Australia to a career in American academia, and she paid close attention to how people narrate their lives. She was wary of the tidy story in which a person picks a goal early and climbs steadily toward it, a script that fits women's lives, and many men's, poorly. Her phrasing treats interruption as part of the material of a life, not as evidence of failure.

A practical example: someone laid off at forty-five might stop asking why their career plan failed. Instead they could ask which of their skills, interests and relationships can be combined into something new, perhaps teaching, consulting or retraining, and let that next arrangement emerge slowly.