56 pages • 1-hour read
Story of My Life
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Challenges and Rewards of Personal Reinvention
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and emotional abuse.
Personal reinvention is at the heart of Story of My Life, with Hazel Hart’s journey charting the messy and nonlinear but ultimately triumphant process of reclaiming and redefining herself. From the opening chapters, Hazel acknowledges the extent of her personal collapse, admitting, “Old Hazel never would have let it get this bad. There were a lot of things the old me would have done differently. But she was dead and buried” (10). This pronouncement marks the death of her former self and simultaneously clears the path for the self-reinvention she undertakes in Story Lake.
To achieve this reinvention, Hazel must shift from being a passive observer to being an active participant in her own life. As she notes, “I’d never been involved before. My entire life I’d taken on the role of observer” (45). Her decision to move, to purchase a home sight unseen, and to invest in a community that initially barely tolerates her reflects how committed she is to this reinvention, even if it’s subconscious. Hazel’s internal dialogue consistently tracks her transformation from victim to agent: “I was officially in Hazel Adventure Mode,” she proclaims, embracing the thrill of uncertainty and “taking risks…like driving and buying houses online” (53). This assertiveness in her own life makes her feel “alive and not just in the one-step-above-comatose way” (53), and this feeling continues the more she takes risks and pursues her desires in the novel.
Even small victories, such as “choosing the curtains and dishes” in her own home (138), represent deeper shifts—claiming ownership not just of a house but of a life. These small choices are more significant than they first seem, especially when the novel later supplies context about Hazel’s former apartment during her relationship with Jim. Living in New York meant that they had to live a minimalist lifestyle without much decorative embellishment. Additionally, due to Jim’s micromanagement and critique of all of Hazel’s choices, he had the most say on the things they displayed in their apartment.
The final, pivotal moment of Hazel’s reinvention occurs when she is confronted by Jim after Summer Fest. Where once she would have buckled under his passive-aggressive manipulations, Hazel stands her ground: “Old Hazel would have caved…But Old Hazel was dead. And New Hazel had spent a significant amount of time with Campbell Bishop” (490). After Hazel stands up to Jim, his emotional manipulations cease, and he leaves town, providing tangible proof that her reinvention has been successful and significant in bringing change to her life.
Happiness as a Lifelong Project
As a romance author, Hazel has spent years believing in the idealized notion of romance depicted in her books—in which the protagonist invariably meets “the one” and, after overcoming some superficial obstacles, marries this perfect man and embarks on a life of undifferentiated happiness—the “happily ever after” ending, which she jokingly abbreviates as “HEA” to highlight its formulaic nature. Because she has mistaken this fantasy for reality, she stayed with Jim much longer than she should have: She believes that he was “the one” for her and that if she couldn’t make it work with him, she’ll never get another chance at love. As she gradually falls in love with Cam, she comes to realize that there is no single person she is destined to be with and that happiness is something she must continually work toward, even within the context of a genuinely loving relationship.
From the outset, Hazel’s belief that she has squandered her one chance at happiness weighs heavily on her: “I’d had my shot at HEA, and it had blown up in my face. That’s why they called it ‘the one’” (29). Her belief in the concept of “the one” kept her in a toxic marriage. The opening chapters reveal that Jim manipulated her financially, putting her name on the mortgage but not the deed and tethering her to debt without offering any real ownership. To this, Hazel asks, “Why? Why? I mean, why would someone who claims to love someone do that?” (36). Jim clearly never valued Hazel in their relationship, but because she was supposed to be living her happily ever after, she convinced herself that she was happy.
Hazel also recalls giving up space for Jim’s possessions, his tastes, and his career, reflecting that while Jim’s goals flourished, “[her] clothes had lived in an armoire” (45), and her books were relegated to hidden spaces. This vivid imagery underscores how thoroughly Hazel allowed herself to be diminished, believing that it was the price of love. This reality is voiced again toward the end of the novel by Hazel’s own mother, who states that Hazel made herself small, subjugating her dreams and passions to fit into Jim’s narrative.
In Story Lake, Hazel begins to realize that life is full of surprising possibilities and doesn’t have to follow the linear narrative of a conventional rom-com. Jim’s sudden arrival in Story Lake forces her to confront the lingering shame of her “failed” marriage, and she realizes that it wasn’t a failure at all in that it gave her the experience to know what she doesn’t want. Ramona, Hazel’s mother, has been married six times and is about to embark on a seventh. Hazel has long seen her as a model of how not to live, but now Ramona appears as a more positive role model—pointing toward a life of continually renewed possibility. Ramona drives the point home when encouraging Hazel to pursue a relationship with Cam: “Stop accepting less than what you’re worth, less than you want” (498). Throughout her time in Story Lake, Hazel forges relationships with many others—people who actually care for her well-being. Hazel eventually confronts the reality that happiness does not arrive with the perfect marriage and then remain as an unchanging state for the rest of one’s life. Cam is everything that Jim is not—loyal, compassionate, and supportive—but even so, Hazel’s future happiness will depend on her willingness to pursue the life she wants on her own terms.
The Healing Power of Community
Themes such as the healing power of community are at the heart of small-town romances such as Story of My Life. At the start of the novel, Hazel is suffering from the aftermath of her divorce and the breakdown of her career. In her physically messy but socially empty apartment in New York, which is about to be taken from her by Jim’s attorney, Hazel feels isolated despite being surrounded by millions. When she feels the first inkling of inspiration for a new story idea, she needs someone to tell, but aside from Zoey, she has nobody who cares. This “before shot” of her life in New York provides a stark contrast to the intimacy and immediacy of Story Lake.
Story Lake, with its open fields and soon-welcoming faces, becomes the embodiment of that comfort that Hazel so desperately seeks. The contrast that Hazel notes between the anonymity of Manhattan and the neighborliness of Story Lake is poignant: “This was the small-town life I’d spent my career writing about…I liked it, I realized. Better than the anonymity of city life” (283). Here, she isn’t just tolerated; she is embraced and even celebrated for being who she is and doing what she does. Through their excessive nosiness, the townspeople teach Hazel that healing doesn’t happen in isolation. Their easy acceptance and their collective investment in her happiness toward the end help prove to Hazel that the wounds Jim left on her were inflicted not because of a flaw in her character but because of flaws in his.
While Hazel finds her healing in the community of Story Lake, Score’s narrative explores “community” as a broader term. Score postulates that community doesn’t need to be defined by physical location; a community can be any group of people gathered because of a commonality. This outlook is illustrated in the context of Hazel’s loyal readers and fans, who create their own community (such as the Facebook page dedicated to her readership). At the start of the novel, during the author event that Hazel attends, she is visited by a mother and her daughter; the mother states,
Your Spring Gate books got me through a year of caregiving and the death of my mother. When she was on hospice, we read the entire series together. Even the steamy parts. It was exactly the kind of escape we both needed and led to some of the most meaningful conversations we’d had as mother and daughter (27).
The community that Hazel has gifted to her readers has helped them cope with loss and aided in strengthening their relationships with their loved ones.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence