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 things 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.