Abstract
Abstract As we have defined it, the life story is a temporally discontinuous unit told over many occasions and altered to fit the specific occasions of speaking, as well as specific addressees, and to reflect changes in the speaker’s long-term situation, values, understanding, and (consequently) discursive practices. Studying a unit of this sort poses substantial problems. Obtaining the text of an entire life story would require recording all the talk ever produced by a given speaker. In principle this is possible, but both practically and ethically it is not. However, obtaining part of the life story is sufficient to indicate the nature of this open unit and the principles of its construction; so we need not be concerned with the entire volume of a lifetime’s worth of talk, but only with a selection from it. Let us now consider how such a selection should be made.
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