A Life in Prose

You are eighteen. The last day of high school was yesterday. This is the first day of the rest of your life. A Life in Prose is text only and reads like a literary novel, lived one year at a time. What you choose comes back years and decades later, and the people you love grow old beside you. ONE PAGE TO BEGIN A short preface asks only your name, who you are (woman, man, or neither), how much your family had, and how many brothers and sisters you have. From that, a written family is drawn around you: a single mother on one paycheck, a two-income house with expectations, the family hardware store on the main street, a mother who crossed an ocean, a quiet house that needed you to grow up early, or old money with a family trust. If you like, choose a tone, who you might fall for, and what you value most. Or leave it to the story. A YEAR AT A TIME Each year holds three decisions. The large ones (college, a career, a proposal, a house, retirement) each take one, so not everything fits in a single year. Your ordinary days carry on by themselves. Most years bring an authored scene with two to four choices, each with a real trade-off. TWELVE SMALL THINGS Each year you have twelve habit points to spend one tap at a time: a cigarette, a drink, a night at the club, a workout, ten quiet minutes, a chapter of a book. Each has its own sound. Small things compound into who you become, and at the end you see the whole of it. THE PEOPLE YOU LET IN Friends and love are met, not given. Family, friends, partners, children, and grandchildren have their own dreams, grudges, and boundaries. They remember how close you were. Friendships left alone drift. Some people go first, with farewells of their own. THE LIVES YOU MIGHT LEAD Steady work. Medicine, through college, medical school, and residency. Teaching, editing, software, and policy. Public life, as far as the presidency. The family shop. Organized crime, with the boss's chair, prison, and life after release, or talking, and a new name in a new town. A family fortune, and everyone who would like some of it. Or none of it. Money matters on every road: debt, bankruptcy, a house, a pension, a will. HOW LONG YOU LAST After sixty, every year carries risk. Decades of exercise, rest, low stress, and close bonds slow a hidden body clock. A neglected body tends to give out in its seventies. A few lives, kept carefully, reach one hundred and twenty. A BOOK LONGER THAN ONE LIFE 1,280 authored scenes and about 400,000 words, with more than 900 variations of everyday moments, far more than any single life can hold. HOW IT ENDS More than twenty endings answer the shape of the life you lived. The epilogue remembers each person in it and tells the truth about the life. Share an end-of-life card, or export the whole life as a book. Twenty-four milestones gather on a bookshelf across lives. Then begin again, from a different family. TO READ BY Set the reading size or use Dynamic Type. Day, white, or night paper. VoiceOver is supported. Typewriter keys, a turning page, and fifteen ambiences to read by. ONE PURCHASE, THE WHOLE BOOK No in-app purchases. No ads. No account. No energy timers. Works fully offline. No data is collected; your saves stay on your device. Requires iOS 17 or later. Contains mature, non-graphic themes including crime, grief, betrayal, addiction, gambling, illness, infidelity, relationship conflict, and mortality. No profanity and no explicit sexual content. What will become of you?