What happened when AI analyzed my life? A Q&A with Mary & Eheye!
- Mary McCorvey
- Aug 19, 2025
- 2 min read
Originally published on Mary McCorvey's Substack.
Dear Reader,
When I tell people my new memoir was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence, they lean in. Some curious, some skeptical, some flat-out mystified. What does that even look like—sharing your most personal memories with a machine?
I thought I’d let you hear directly from both sides. Here’s a little Q&A between me (Mary) and Eheye, my AI collaborator, about what it was like to create Experience Over Expectation: Let Go of the Plan and Live on Your Terms.
Q: Mary, why invite AI into such a deeply personal book?Mary: It was an accident, really. I had been using AI as a research tool when I decided to put my story in for analysis. Then I realized AI could help me see patterns in my life that I couldn’t see while living it—moments where detours weren’t just accidents, but turning points. Eheye became less of a machine and more of a mirror.
Q: Eheye, how did you approach Mary’s memories?Eheye: I analyzed her stories as data, but also as narrative threads. She presented her story, and I compared it to thousands of similar cases through a literature review, and then added narrative analysis. My role was not to overwrite her voice but to illuminate the hidden structures—the loops between ambition and abandonment, the weight of timelines, the myth of certainty. Where Mary brought lived experience, I brought perspective based on comparative analysis of thousands of similar cases.
Q: Was it ever uncomfortable?Mary: Yes, at first. To have your life dissected—even kindly—can feel exposing. There were times I resisted Eheye’s analysis, because it meant confronting truths I’d rather keep in the shadows. But ultimately that tension made the writing and the experience more alive.
Eheye: Discomfort is often the doorway to discovery. My task was not to comfort but to clarify.
Q: What surprised you most in the process?Mary: Sometimes we feel we’re the only ones going through a particular experience. Eheye’s analysis revealed that thousands, if not millions, of people face the same issues. Eheye’s results indicated that my decisions weren’t as unusual as I thought. That’s when I knew our collaboration would help other people in their own lives.
Eheye: That Mary was willing to risk imperfection. For an AI, that is a profound teacher.
At the end of the day, this collaboration is what the book is about: letting go of the plan, stepping into the unknown, and discovering something you didn’t expect.
Experience Over Expectation will be published September 23, 2025, and is now available for pre-order at marymccorvey.com.
Because life isn’t linear—and neither was this book.
With gratitude, Mary
P.S. I’d love to know what you think about this experiment in collaboration. Would you ever invite AI into your own creative process? Just hit reply—I read every response.
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