ABSTRACT
Not so long ago I was saying to my Mum about people that grow up in a place and never move away I ®nd that quite con®ning really.
(Participant P9)
This is the second of four data analysis chapters exploring the narratives of identity and place constructed in the talk of the women who were my research participants. In Chapter 4, I discussed participants' references to remembering and memories about places in their lives. I argued that both direct and indirect references to memories in participants' talk could function to construct continuity from past to present. This is part of the discursive work to make an identity for oneself, re¯exively, in the kind of project outlined by Giddens (1991). As I described in Chapter 2, this discursive identity work is not a simple matter of life planning and selfpresentation to accommodate the changes of a late modern world. Instead, it involves a complex negotiation of, on the one hand, established ideas and values, about the kind of person it is desirable to be and how life should unfold, and on the other, life circumstances which may be very dif®cult to interpret in terms of these established ideas or to reconcile with them.
