Visual media offer possible lives through soap operas, talk shows, and newspapers and magazines. This text explores a variety of occasions during which people consume personal narratives, aiming to expand our understanding of how we negotiate and commodify identity.

Introduction, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Part I Speaking bodies: bad girls and sick boys - inside the body in fiction, film, and performance art, Linda S. Kauffman; "voicing" deaf identity - through the "I's" and ears of an other, H-Dirksen L. Bauman; medical identity - my DNA/myself, Kay K. Cook. Part II Enter-taining lives: morphing identities - Arnold Schwarze-negger - write us, Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz; performing teen motherhood on video - autoethnography as counterdiscourse, Salome Chasnoff; the mediated talking cure - therapeutic framing of autobiography in tv talk shows, Janice Peck; want ads - reading the personals, Traci Carroll. Part III Un/speakable lives: consensual autobiography - narrating "personal sexual history" from Boswell's "london journal" to AIDS pamphlet literature, Philip E. Baruth; survivor discourse - transgression or recuperation?, Linda Martin Alcoff and Laura Gray-Rosendale; taking it to a limit one more time - autobiography and autism, Sidonie Smith. Part IV Family portraits: "what kind of life have I got?" gender in the life story of an "ordinary" woman, Susan Ostrov Weisser; race/identity/culture/kin - constructions of African American identity in transracial adoption, Sandra Patton; ordering the family - genealogy as autobiographical pedigree, Julia Watson. Part V Institutionalised lives: twelve-step teleology - narratives of recovery/recovery as narrative, Robyn R. Warhol and Helena Michie; professional subjects - prepacking the academic CV, Martin A. Danahay; (for)getting a life - testimony, identity, and power, William Chaloupka; epilogue - pieces of my heart, Julia Watson.