Abstract

This article examines the retrospective accounts of drunken behaviour by groups of students who drink together regularly. The literature on `collective remembering' has demonstrated how shared memories are constructed discursively, and this is likely to be even more true of memories for events when participants were drunk. Close reading of the extracts from one particular interview reveals the way participants construct `drunken identities' for one another, and suggests how they may embroider narrative recollections through subsequent information becoming available to supplement their sketchy individual recall. The implications of these processes are discussed with reference to legal contexts and theories of self and identity.