This book is about individuals who have made dramatic changes in their lives. In the beginning, these people were living as patients or victims of circumstance. In the end, they were living as agents, free to shape the courses of their lives, to choose, set goals, plan-to make things happen, rather than to experience life as events happening to them.

The authors describe what is involved in such remarkable transformations. They identify a common structure of transformation involving four distinguishable phases. They also clarify a progressive dialectic between living the plot of a patient and living the plot of an agent, and show how an old plot is destroyed or deconstructed and a new plot is constructed.