In The grammar of autobiography, Jean Quigley makes a claim that one often hears nowadays: that the self is constructed in autobiographical narrative discourse. Two dimensions of the work distinguish her analysis of narrative self-construction from many other treatments of the subject. First, she offers a genuinely interdisciplinary account, drawing on functional linguistics, theoretical and developmental psychology, and accounts of language development. Second, she studies a particular category of linguistic forms – modals – as the key to narrative self-construction.