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Autobiography and Play: “A Conversation with My 12 Year Old Self”

This article considers how auto/biography scholarship might read and understand the use of the archive of play by contemporary autobiographers. Drawing on the work of the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott, I examine how documents generated from play can be read as instances of self-life-writing, and demonstrate the interpretive approaches that we might use to consider texts which incorporate the archive of play in self-representation. Taking an autobiographical video posted to YouTube that “went viral” in December 2012 as an example, I argue that Winnicott's distinction between the content and the activity of play offers not only a way of understanding the role of playing in developing and understanding a sense of self but also a way of reading autobiographical texts that re-mediate materials produced through childhood play.