Prospective adoptive parents who take part in a Dutch adoption assessment procedure are asked to write
down their life stories. In this article we examine how information from the life stories is deleted, selected
and transformed into a topic to talk about in an assessment interview and/or to write about in a
recommendation record. We have shown in a detailed analysis how prospective adoptive parents
demonstrate themselves to be “normal people” with “normal childhoods” and how life events are selected