This article explores the role of personal life narrative as a self-shaping transformative process in the day-to-day family lives of 17 US children diagnosed with autism. Employing ethnographic video-and audio-taped data of naturalistic family interaction, the article illumines how family members employ conversational narrative in co-creating, with children, possible imagined futures, aspirations, and goals. Despite uncertain futures and unknown clinical outcomes, children are encouraged to engage in self-reflexive narrative practices that portray them in a hopeful yet realistic light. By exploring moment-by-moment details of talk-in-interaction in the lives of children diagnosed with autism, the article contributes to scholarship on how children’s experiences and self-conceptions pertaining to well-being, disability, and difference are configured and shaped via discursive practices carried out within the family sphere. Children with autism display socio-communicative difficulties that call attention to, and render visible, discursive processes involved in children’s acquisition of culturally rooted narrative capacities. As such, analysis is positioned to shed light on children’s narrative proclivities in fathoming and reflecting upon personal life experience.
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