In this chapter Linda Arnell examines how conceptions and norms regarding families and family patterns influence girls’ lives and the constructions of their subjectivity. Arnell focuses on 18-year-old Amanda’s narrative about her families and her troublesome upbringing. The narrative is understood as a continuous creation in relation to a broader societal narrative that occurs in intra-action with the researcher, and in relation to discursive possibilities and constraints. Through this one narrative the chapter examines how normative ideas about family can be understood as regulatory power structures that are ever-present in a complex and troubled narrative about family, girlhood, and a girl with experience of acting out.