Case Study: Becoming

Abstract

When Michael Nichols Ford is put on probationary expulsion at his private high school, his family is forced to document their attempts toward self-improvement in order to satisfy the School Board. To do so, they seek the help of UCME Inc.’s star therapist, Harold, a Body Language Transcriptionist and in-world narrator who articulates the family’s hidden interior lives in real-time, undermining their attempts to build a narrative of change and self-actualization as he purportedly lays bare the “objective truth.” The story is told in the form of UCME’s internal records—Harold’s transcripts, family emails, public records, corporate reports, data analytics—as the company’s artificial intelligence analyzes the family and Harold. This novel explores the ways in which an individual’s identity is actively constructed through self-curated narrative, and how that identity clashes with the perceptions of others.