autobiography narrative memoir

Memoir vs Autobiography: Understanding the Key Differences

By: Author Valerie Forgeard

Posted on May 10, 2024

Categories Reading , Storytelling , Writing

A memoir and an autobiography are both forms of personal narrative that delve into an individual’s life experiences, but they serve distinct purposes and adhere to different structures.

An autobiography is a comprehensive narration that covers an author’s entire life from birth to the present, offering a detailed chronology of events and facts. It is expected to be factually accurate and exhaustive, encapsulating a wide spectrum of life’s milestones.

In contrast, a memoir tends to be more selective and subjective. It may focus on a particular theme or a significant segment of the author’s life, emphasizing emotional truth and personal reflection. Memoir writers often aim to establish a deep connection with the reader, employing a storytelling approach that prioritizes emotional resonance over chronological exactitude.

The distinction between the two can be seen in how they approach their narratives: a memoir is akin to a snapshot of a pivotal moment or series of moments, imparting personal insights and truths, while an autobiography resembles a full-length documentary, capturing a life’s story with precision and breadth.

Defining Memoir and Autobiography

In the realm of nonfiction, memoirs and autobiographies allow authors to present their life stories, but they adhere to different conventions and serve distinct literary functions.

Core Characteristics

Memoir is a term that specifies a narrative focused on specific memories or pivotal moments from the author’s life, often presented with reflective and emotional overtones. Memoirs tend to zoom in on a particular period or theme, offering deep insights into personal experiences and their broader impacts. They are less about the comprehensive chronology and more about the subjective journey and emotional truths.

Contrast, an autobiography might be seen as the exhaustive mapping of an individual’s life. It is a chronological account, commencing with birth and following through to the present or the end of their life. Autobiographies are structured around the factual and often strive for a complete historical portrayal of one’s life, including significant milestones and achievements.

Historical Evolution

The memoir as a literary genre has evolved significantly over time, with early iterations akin to autobiographies but without their sweeping scope. Modern memoirs, however, have become more selective, seeking to engage readers through shared human conditions and powerful storytelling.

The concept of an autobiography has remained relatively stable, rooted in the comprehensive recording of a person’s life. This form has long been associated with influential figures and serves as a method for public personas to share their life stories with a degree of formal structure and attention to factual detail.

Both genres reflect an author’s perspective and presence, thus contributing valuable insights into the human condition as documented through the lenses of personal history within nonfiction writing .

Structural Differences

In examining the structural variations between memoirs and autobiographies, one will find distinct differences in the approaches to chronology and the extent of the life story they cover.

Chronology in Narrative

Memoirs often adopt a non-traditional approach to chronology , focusing on thematic connections rather than strict chronological order . The structure can be flexible, weaving in and out of different time periods as they relate to the overall theme or message the author is conveying. This may involve flashbacks or reflective passages that link past events to current reflections.

Scope and Focus

Conversely, autobiographies usually maintain a broader scope , presenting the narrative of one’s whole life from birth to the present day in a linear fashion. The structure here is more traditionally chronological, cataloging events as they occurred through time.

An autobiography aims to provide a comprehensive history rather than emphasizing a specific period or theme. It seeks to document the full spectrum of experiences and achievements of an individual’s life.

Emotional and Thematic Content

Choosing between a memoir and an autobiography often hinges on how the writer wishes to engage with the audience through emotional depth and central themes . This section will explore how each format addresses personal experiences and emotions , and how themes and messages are developed to establish a connection with the reader.

Personal Experiences and Emotion

In memoirs, authors have the latitude to deeply explore their personal experiences with a focus on emotional truth . They offer a profound emotional connection by reflecting on the feelings and insights that these experiences elicited. For instance, writing a memoir allows an author to share not just the events of their life but also the emotional journey that accompanied those events, providing a more intimate reading experience.

Themes and Messages

Contrasting with autobiographies, memoirs are often designed around a central theme or message , rather than a comprehensive life story. This focused approach allows the writer to illuminate lessons learned or insights gained, making it a powerful tool for delivering a resonating message .

The thematic bones of a memoir can vary widely, from overcoming adversity to the joy of discovery, each underscored by the emotional resonance that binds the narrative together.

The Role of the Author

In both memoirs and autobiographies, the author undeniably plays a central role not only as the narrator but also as the subject. The nuances in their storytelling and purpose set apart the impact and structure of each genre.

First-Person Perspective

Memoirs and autobiographies are crafted from a first-person perspective , giving the reader an intimate lens through which to view the author’s experiences. The writer’s perspective is the core of both narratives, revealing personal essays that frame their experiences with immediacy and presence. A memoir often hinges on this perspective to draw the reader into specific personal stories.

Author’s Intention and Reflection

The intentions and reflections present in the author’s writing can vary significantly between a memoir and an autobiography. In autobiographies, the intention often circles around documenting the historical account of their life, elucidating a factual chronology from birth to the present.

Whereas in memoirs, the writer’s reflection is more pronounced, they emphasize particular life events to share a thematic or emotional journey rather than a comprehensive life story. The personal essay format of a memoir relies heavily on an author’s reflection to convey deeper truths about human experience .

Influence and Impact on the Reader

The measure of a book’s success often lies in its capacity to influence and impact its readers on an emotional and educational level. Memoirs and autobiographies, while similar, achieve this in distinct ways.

Creating Connection

Memoirs tap into the profound depths of the writers’ experiences to forge a strong emotional connection with their readers. This genre is not just about the events themselves but also about the emotions and reflections that accompany them. Readers often find memoirs relatable because they focus on specific themes , allowing individuals to see aspects of their own lives mirrored in the narrative. For instance, a memoir can make a reader feel as if they are walking alongside the author through their most transformative life events .

Educational Value

Autobiographies, however, often contain a comprehensive account of the author’s life, which can be educational in scope. Readers gain insights into not only the personal journeys but also historical and cultural contexts that shaped the author’s experiences.

An autobiography can serve as a de facto masterclass on an individual’s entire life, offering readers a chronological understanding of the subject’s history and development within their professional field or influence on society.

Examining Notable Works

In examining the impact and contribution to literature , it’s important to look at specific examples of autobiographies and memoirs that have left an indelible mark on readers and the literary world.

Famous Autobiographies

Autobiographies provide an encompassing look into an individual’s life, often presenting a chronological journey from birth to the present. Nelson Mandela’s “Long Walk to Freedom” is a profound testament to his resilience and leadership in the face of apartheid in South Africa. Benjamin Franklin is another distinguished figure whose autobiography has inspired countless individuals with its portrayal of American Enlightenment ideas.

The narratives of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X are pivotal, highlighting racial injustice in America and the power of transformation ; the former through “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” and the latter via “ The Autobiography of Malcolm X ,” as told to Alex Haley. Helen Keller’s “The Story of My Life” also serves as a beacon of courage, detailing her journey as an author and activist who overcame the challenges of being deaf and blind.

Memorable Memoirs

A memoir often focuses on specific themes or periods from the author’s life, reflecting on the emotional and personal growth of the individual. Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” shines a light on identity and racism through the lens of her early experiences. Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes” provides a haunting yet humorous account of his impoverished childhood in Ireland.

Joan Didion crafted a powerful narrative on grief in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” reflecting on the year following the death of her husband. Elie Wiesel’s memoir “Night” confronts the horrors he survived during the Holocaust, embodying a chilling testament of history. Meanwhile, David Sedaris uses wit and observation in “Me Talk Pretty One Day” to explore the idiosyncrasies of his life. The personal struggles and triumphs of Malala Yousafzai are poignantly narrated in “I Am Malala,” inspiring readers worldwide.

Ernest Hemingway and Elizabeth Gilbert utilized the memoir format to recount significant personal journeys. Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” delves into his years in 1920s Paris, while Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” recounts a year of exploration and self-discovery.

Andre Agassi and Roxane Gay wrote memoirs offering raw insights into their lives. Agassi’s “Open” reveals the complexities behind his illustrious tennis career, while Gay’s “Hunger” is a brave exposition of her relationship with her body and self-image.

The transformative experiences of Piper Kerman in “Orange Is the New Black” and Malala Yousafzai ‘s activism in “I Am Malala” have struck chords with readers, highlighting the potential for personal memoirs to effect change and resonate on a global scale.

Understanding these notable works enriches our appreciation for the unique lenses through which autobiographies and memoirs are written, offering a profound glimpse into the human experience.

Writing Your Own

When one sets out to pen a personal narrative , they grapple with the choice of a memoir or autobiography, each offering a unique avenue for sharing life stories. The decision shapes not only the content but also the connection with readers.

Choosing Between Memoir and Autobiography

A memoir typically zooms in on specific themes or periods in a person’s life, conveying more emotional depth and personal insights. It’s a slice of life that resonates with overarching themes common to human experiences. For example, one might focus a memoir on the trials and triumphs of their artistic career, highlighting critical moments that define their personal growth and development.

An autobiography , on the other hand, presents a more comprehensive chronology of the author’s life. It’s often factual and holistic, starting from early life and progressing through major milestones and achievements. When an author wishes to document their entire life’s journey as a historical record, an autobiography is the suitable format. This approach requires meticulous attention to detail and often involves a chronological recount of the author’s life experiences.

Tips for Aspiring Authors

Begin with a plan : Establish whether the aim is to explore a particular aspect of life (memoir) or to narrate life from start to present (autobiography). Consult credible resources like Masterclass for insights into the distinctions.

Be reflective : Regardless of the chosen format, reflection is key. Tap into personal feelings, lessons learned, and experiences that shaped who you are. This introspective approach is paramount for both memoirs and autobiographies.

Develop your voice : A unique narrative voice is crucial. Whether it’s the conversational tone of a memoir or the authoritative recount of an autobiography, the voice should be compelling and authentic.

Focus on storytelling : Narrate your experiences in a way that engages readers. Grammarly suggests that good storytelling transcends mere facts, weaving experiences into a narrative that captivates readers.

Edit meticulously : A successful personal account demands rigorous editing. A story is only as compelling as it is clear and well-written.

In distinguishing between memoirs and autobiographies , it is essential for one to recognize the scope and detail each literary form entails. An autobiography offers a comprehensive recollection of an individual’s entire life story , chronicling their birth, upbringing, achievements , and struggles . It often follows a chronological structure and demands extensive reflection and thorough documentation of events.

Memoirs, on the other hand, present a more concentrated exploration, focusing on pivotal events or periods within a person’s life. These works are typically less comprehensive but rich in emotional and introspective detail. The lens through which a memoir is written is aimed at bringing forth the writer’s personal reflection on significant experiences, revealing insights into their choices and the lessons learned.

• Autobiography : Chronicles the entirety of one’s life.
• Memoir : Highlights specific chapters of personal significance.

Writers choose between these forms based on their intent to either recount their life’s full tapestry or illuminate select threads that hold unique personal meaning. Each format serves its purpose, allowing readers to delve into the narrative – be it the detailed map of a full life’s journey or the magnified examination of its critical junctures.

The Differences between Memoir, Autobiography, and Biography - article

Creative nonfiction: memoir vs. autobiography vs. biography.

Writing any type of nonfiction story can be a daunting task. As the author, you have the responsibility to tell a true story and share the facts as accurately as you can—while also making the experience enjoyable for the reader.

There are three primary formats to tell a creative nonfiction story: memoir, autobiography, and biography. Each has its own distinct characteristics, so it’s important to understand the differences between them to ensure you’re writing within the correct scope.

A memoir is a collection of personal memories related to specific moments or experiences in the author’s life. Told from the perspective of the author, memoirs are written in first person point of view.

The defining characteristic that sets memoirs apart from autobiographies and biographies is its scope. While the other genres focus on the entire timeline of a person’s life, memoirs structure themselves on one aspect, such as addiction, parenting, adolescence, disease, faith, etc.

They may tell stories from various moments in the author’s life, but they should read like a cohesive story—not just a re-telling of facts.

“You don’t want a voice that simply relates facts to the reader. You want a voice that shows the reader what’s going on and puts him or her in the room with the people you’re writing about.” – Kevan Lyon in Writing a Memoir

Unlike autobiographies and biographies, memoirs focus more on the author’s relationship to and feelings about his or her own memories. Memoirs tend to read more like a fiction novel than a factual account, and should include things like dialogue , setting, character descriptions, and more.

Authors looking to write a memoir can glean insight from both fiction and nonfiction genres. Although memoirs tell a true story, they focus on telling an engaging narrative, just like a novel. This gives memoir authors a little more flexibility to improve upon the story slightly for narrative effect.

However, you should represent dialogue and scenarios as accurately as you can, especially if you’re worried about libel and defamation lawsuits .

Examples of popular memoirs include Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.

Key traits of a memoir:

- Written in 1 st person POV from the perspective of the author - Less formal compared to autobiographies and biographies - Narrow in scope or timeline - Focused more on feelings and memories than facts - More flexibility to change the story for effect

Autobiography

Like a memoir, an autobiography is the author’s retelling of his or her life and told in first person point of view, making the author the main character of the story.

Autobiographies are also narrative nonfiction, so the stories are true but also include storytelling elements such as a protagonist (the author), a central conflict, and a cast of intriguing characters.

Unlike memoirs, autobiographies focus more on facts than emotions. Because of this, a collaborator often joins the project to help the author tell the most factual, objective story possible.

While a memoir is limited in scope, an autobiography details the author’s entire life up to the present. An autobiography often begins when the author is young and includes detailed chronology, events, places, reactions, movements and other relevant happenings throughout the author’s life.

“In many people’s memoir, they do start when they’re younger, but it isn’t an, ‘I got a dog, then we got a fish, and then I learned to tie my shoes’…it isn’t that kind of detail.” – Linda Joy Meyers in Memoir vs. Autobiography

The chronology of an autobiography is organized but not necessarily in date order. For instance, the author may start from current time and employ flashbacks or he/she may organize events thematically.

Autobiographers use many sources of information to develop the story such as letters, photographs, and other personal memorabilia. However, like a memoir, the author’s personal memory is the primary resource. Any other sources simply enrich the story and relay accurate and engaging experiences.

A good autobiography includes specific details that only the author knows and provides context by connecting those details to larger issues, themes, or events. This allows the reader to relate more personally to the author’s experience. 

Examples of popular autobiographies include The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

Key traits of an autobiography:

- Written in 1 st person POV from the perspective of the author, occasionally with the help of a collaborator - More formal and objective than memoirs, but more subjective than biographies - Broad in scope or timeline, often covering the author’s entire life up to the present - Focused more on facts than emotions - Requires more extensive fact-checking and research than memoirs, but less than biographies

A biography is the story of events and circumstances of a person’s life, written by someone other than that person. Usually, people write biographies about a  historical  or  public figure . They can be written with or without the subject’s authorization.

Since the author is telling the account of someone else, biographies are always in third person point of view and carry a more formal and objective tone than both memoirs and autobiographies.

Like an autobiography, biographies cover the entire scope of the subject’s life, so it should include details about his or her birthplace, educational background, work history, relationships, death and more.

Good biographers will research and study a person’s life to collect facts and present the most historically accurate, multi-faceted picture of an individual’s experiences as possible. A biography should include intricate details—so in-depth research is necessary to ensure accuracy.

“If you’re dealing principally with historical figures who are long dead, there are very few legal problems…if you’re dealing with a more sensitive issue…then the lawyers will be crawling all over the story.” – David Margolick in Legal Issues with Biographies

However, biographies are still considered creative nonfiction, so the author has the ability to analyze and interpret events in the subject’s life, looking for meaning in their actions, uncovering mistakes, solving mysteries, connecting details, and highlighting the significance of the person's accomplishments or life activities.

Authors often organize events in chronological order, but can sometimes organize by themes or specific accomplishments or topics, depending on their book’s key idea.

Examples of popular biographies include Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

Key traits of a biography:

- Written about another person, often a celebrity or public figure, and told in 3 rd person point of view - More formal and objective than both memoirs and autobiographies - Broad in scope or timeline, often covering the subject’s entire life up to the present - Focused solely on facts - Requires meticulous research and fact-checking to ensure accuracy

• Biographies and Memoirs
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Met you this morning briefly and just bought your book on Amazon. Congratulations. 

Very helpful. I think I am heading down the path of a memoir.

Thank you explaining the differences between the three writing styles!

Very useful article. Well done. Please can we have more. Doctor's Orders !!!

My first book, "Tales of a Meandering Medic" is definitely a Memoir.

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If you’ve thought about putting your life to the page, you may have wondered how to write a memoir. We start the road to writing a memoir when we realize that a story in our lives demands to be told. As Maya Angelou once wrote, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

How to write a memoir? At first glance, it looks easy enough—easier, in any case, than writing fiction. After all, there is no need to make up a story or characters, and the protagonist is none other than you.

Still, memoir writing carries its own unique challenges, as well as unique possibilities that only come from telling your own true story. Let’s dive into how to write a memoir by looking closely at the craft of memoir writing, starting with a key question: exactly what is a memoir?

How to Write a Memoir: Contents

What is a Memoir?

• Memoir vs Autobiography

Memoir Examples

Short memoir examples.

• How to Write a Memoir: A Step-by-Step Guide

A memoir is a branch of creative nonfiction , a genre defined by the writer Lee Gutkind as “true stories, well told.” The etymology of the word “memoir,” which comes to us from the French, tells us of the human urge to put experience to paper, to remember. Indeed, a memoir is “ something written to be kept in mind .”

A memoir is defined by Lee Gutkind as “true stories, well told.”

For a piece of writing to be called a memoir, it has to be:

• Nonfictional
• Based on the raw material of your life and your memories
• Written from your personal perspective

At this point, memoirs are beginning to sound an awful lot like autobiographies. However, a quick comparison of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love , and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin , for example, tells us that memoirs and autobiographies could not be more distinct.

Next, let’s look at the characteristics of a memoir and what sets memoirs and autobiographies apart. Discussing memoir vs. autobiography will not only reveal crucial insights into the process of writing a memoir, but also help us to refine our answer to the question, “What is a memoir?”

Memoir vs. Autobiography

While both use personal life as writing material, there are five key differences between memoir and autobiography:

1. Structure

Since autobiographies tell the comprehensive story of one’s life, they are more or less chronological. writing a memoir, however, involves carefully curating a list of personal experiences to serve a larger idea or story, such as grief, coming-of-age, and self-discovery. As such, memoirs do not have to unfold in chronological order.

While autobiographies attempt to provide a comprehensive account, memoirs focus only on specific periods in the writer’s life. The difference between autobiographies and memoirs can be likened to that between a CV and a one-page resume, which includes only select experiences.

The difference between autobiographies and memoirs can be likened to that between a CV and a one-page resume, which includes only select experiences.

Autobiographies prioritize events; memoirs prioritize the writer’s personal experience of those events. Experience includes not just the event you might have undergone, but also your feelings, thoughts, and reflections. Memoir’s insistence on experience allows the writer to go beyond the expectations of formal writing. This means that memoirists can also use fiction-writing techniques , such as scene-setting and dialogue , to capture their stories with flair.

4. Philosophy

Another key difference between the two genres stems from the autobiography’s emphasis on facts and the memoir’s reliance on memory. Due to memory’s unreliability, memoirs ask the reader to focus less on facts and more on emotional truth. In addition, memoir writers often work the fallibility of memory into the narrative itself by directly questioning the accuracy of their own memories.

Memoirs ask the reader to focus less on facts and more on emotional truth.

5. Audience

While readers pick up autobiographies to learn about prominent individuals, they read memoirs to experience a story built around specific themes . Memoirs, as such, tend to be more relatable, personal, and intimate. Really, what this means is that memoirs can be written by anybody!

Ready to be inspired yet? Let’s now turn to some memoir examples that have received widespread recognition and captured our imaginations!

If you’re looking to lose yourself in a book, the following memoir examples are great places to begin:

• The Year of Magical Thinking , which chronicles Joan Didion’s year of mourning her husband’s death, is certainly one of the most powerful books on grief. Written in two short months, Didion’s prose is urgent yet lucid, compelling from the first page to the last. A few years later, the writer would publish Blue Nights , another devastating account of grief, only this time she would be mourning her daughter.
• Patti Smith’s Just Kids is a classic coming-of-age memoir that follows the author’s move to New York and her romance and friendship with the artist Robert Maplethorpe. In its pages, Smith captures the energy of downtown New York in the late sixties and seventies effortlessly.
• When Breath Becomes Air begins when Paul Kalanithi, a young neurosurgeon, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Exquisite and poignant, this memoir grapples with some of the most difficult human experiences, including fatherhood, mortality, and the search for meaning.
• A memoir of relationship abuse, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is candid and innovative in form. Machado writes about thorny and turbulent subjects with clarity, even wit. While intensely personal, In the Dream House is also one of most insightful pieces of cultural criticism.
• Twenty-five years after leaving for Canada, Michael Ondaatje returns to his native Sri Lanka to sort out his family’s past. The result is Running in the Family , the writer’s dazzling attempt to reconstruct fragments of experiences and family legends into a portrait of his parents’ and grandparents’ lives. (Importantly, Running in the Family was sold to readers as a fictional memoir; its explicit acknowledgement of fictionalization prevented it from encountering the kind of backlash that James Frey would receive for fabricating key facts in A Million Little Pieces , which he had sold as a memoir . )
• Of the many memoirs published in recent years, Tara Westover’s Educated is perhaps one of the most internationally-recognized. A story about the struggle for self-determination, Educated recounts the writer’s childhood in a survivalist family and her subsequent attempts to make a life for herself. All in all, powerful, thought-provoking, and near impossible to put down.

While book-length memoirs are engaging reads, the prospect of writing a whole book can be intimidating. Fortunately, there are plenty of short, essay-length memoir examples that are just as compelling.

While memoirists often write book-length works, you might also consider writing a memoir that’s essay-length. Here are some short memoir examples that tell complete, lived stories, in far fewer words:

• “ The Book of My Life ” offers a portrait of a professor that the writer, Aleksandar Hemon, once had as a child in communist Sarajevo. This memoir was collected into Hemon’s The Book of My Lives , a collection of essays about the writer’s personal history in wartime Yugoslavia and subsequent move to the US.
• “The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week.” So begins Cheryl Strayed’s “ The Love of My Life ,” an essay that the writer eventually expanded into the best-selling memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail .
• In “ What We Hunger For ,” Roxane Gay weaves personal experience and a discussion of The Hunger Games into a powerful meditation on strength, trauma, and hope. “What We Hunger For” can also be found in Gay’s essay collection, Bad Feminist .
• A humorous memoir structured around David Sedaris and his family’s memories of pets, “ The Youth in Asia ” is ultimately a story about grief, mortality and loss. This essay is excerpted from the memoir Me Talk Pretty One Day , and a recorded version can be found here .

So far, we’ve 1) answered the question “What is a memoir?” 2) discussed differences between memoirs vs. autobiographies, 3) taken a closer look at book- and essay-length memoir examples. Next, we’ll turn the question of how to write a memoir.

How to Write a Memoir: A-Step-by-Step Guide

1. how to write a memoir: generate memoir ideas.

how to start a memoir? As with anything, starting is the hardest. If you’ve yet to decide what to write about, check out the “ I Remember ” writing prompt. Inspired by Joe Brainard’s memoir I Remember , this prompt is a great way to generate a list of memories. From there, choose one memory that feels the most emotionally charged and begin writing your memoir. It’s that simple! If you’re in need of more prompts, our Facebook group is also a great resource.

2. How to Write a Memoir: Begin drafting

My most effective advice is to resist the urge to start from “the beginning.” Instead, begin with the event that you can’t stop thinking about, or with the detail that, for some reason, just sticks. The key to drafting is gaining momentum . Beginning with an emotionally charged event or detail gives us the drive we need to start writing.

3. How to Write a Memoir: Aim for a “ shitty first draft ”

Now that you have momentum, maintain it. Attempting to perfect your language as you draft makes it difficult to maintain our impulses to write. It can also create self-doubt and writers’ block. Remember that most, if not all, writers, no matter how famous, write shitty first drafts.

Attempting to perfect your language as you draft makes it difficult to maintain our impulses to write.

4. How to Write a Memoir: Set your draft aside

Once you have a first draft, set it aside and fight the urge to read it for at least a week. Stephen King recommends sticking first drafts in your drawer for at least six weeks. This period allows writers to develop the critical distance we need to revise and edit the draft that we’ve worked so hard to write.

5. How to Write a Memoir: Reread your draft

While reading your draft, note what works and what doesn’t, then make a revision plan. While rereading, ask yourself:

• What’s underdeveloped, and what’s superfluous.
• Does the structure work?
• What story are you telling?

6. How to Write a Memoir: Revise your memoir and repeat steps 4 & 5 until satisfied

Every piece of good writing is the product of a series of rigorous revisions. Depending on what kind of writer you are and how you define a draft,” you may need three, seven, or perhaps even ten drafts. There’s no “magic number” of drafts to aim for, so trust your intuition. Many writers say that a story is never, truly done; there only comes a point when they’re finished with it. If you find yourself stuck in the revision process, get a fresh pair of eyes to look at your writing.

7. How to Write a Memoir: Edit, edit, edit!

Once you’re satisfied with the story, begin to edit the finer things (e.g. language, metaphor , and details). Clean up your word choice and omit needless words , and check to make sure you haven’t made any of these common writing mistakes . Be sure to also know the difference between revising and editing —you’ll be doing both. Then, once your memoir is ready, send it out !

Learn How to Write a Memoir at Writers.com

Writing a memoir for the first time can be intimidating. But, keep in mind that anyone can learn how to write a memoir. Trust the value of your own experiences: it’s not about the stories you tell, but how you tell them. Most importantly, don’t give up!

Anyone can learn how to write a memoir.

If you’re looking for additional feedback, as well as additional instruction on how to write a memoir, check out our schedule of nonfiction classes . Now, get started writing your memoir!

29 Comments

Thank you for this website. It’s very engaging. I have been writing a memoir for over three years, somewhat haphazardly, based on the first half of my life and its encounters with ignorance (religious restrictions, alcohol, and inability to reach out for help). Three cities were involved: Boston as a youngster growing up and going to college, then Washington DC and Chicago North Shore as a married woman with four children. I am satisfied with some chapters and not with others. Editing exposes repetition and hopefully discards boring excess. Reaching for something better is always worth the struggle. I am 90, continue to be a recital pianist, a portrait painter, and a writer. Hubby has been dead for nine years. Together we lept a few of life’s chasms and I still miss him. But so far, my occupations keep my brain working fairly well, especially since I don’t smoke or drink (for the past 50 years).

Hi Mary Ellen,

It sounds like a fantastic life for a memoir! Thank you for sharing, and best of luck finishing your book. Let us know when it’s published!

Best, The writers.com Team

Hello Mary Ellen,

I am contacting you because your last name (Lavelle) is my middle name!

Being interested in genealogy I have learned that this was my great grandfathers wife’s name (Mary Lavelle), and that her family emigrated here about 1850 from County Mayo, Ireland. That is also where my fathers family came from.

Is your family background similar?

Hope to hear back from you.

Richard Lavelle Bourke

Hi Mary Ellen: Have you finished your memoir yet? I just came across your post and am seriously impressed that you are still writing. I discovered it again at age 77 and don’t know what I would do with myself if I couldn’t write. All the best to you!! Sharon [email protected]

I am up to my eyeballs with a research project and report for a non-profit. And some paid research for an international organization. But as today is my 90th birthday, it is time to retire and write a memoir.

So I would like to join a list to keep track of future courses related to memoir / creative non-fiction writing.

Hi Frederick,

Happy birthday! And happy retirement as well. I’ve added your name and email to our reminder list for memoir courses–when we post one on our calendar, we’ll send you an email.

We’ll be posting more memoir courses in the near future, likely for the months of January and February 2022. We hope to see you in one!

Very interesting and informative, I am writing memoirs from my long often adventurous and well travelled life, have had one very short story published. Your advice on several topics will be extremely helpful. I write under my schoolboy nickname Barnaby Rudge.

[…] How to Write a Memoir: Examples and a Step-by-Step Guide […]

I am writing my memoir from my memory when I was 5 years old and now having left my birthplace I left after graduation as a doctor I moved to UK where I have been living. In between I have spent 1 year in Canada during my training year as paediatrician. I also spent nearly 2 years with British Army in the hospital as paediatrician in Germany. I moved back to UK to work as specialist paediatrician in a very busy general hospital outside London for the next 22 years. Then I retired from NHS in 2012. I worked another 5 years in Canada until 2018. I am fully retired now

I have the whole convoluted story of my loss and horrid aftermath in my head (and heart) but have no clue WHERE, in my story to begin. In the middle of the tragedy? What led up to it? Where my life is now, post-loss, and then write back and forth? Any suggestions?

My friend Laura who referred me to this site said “Start”! I say to you “Start”!

Hi Dee, that has been a challenge for me.i dont know where to start?

What was the most painful? Embarrassing? Delicious? Unexpected? Who helped you? Who hurt you? Pick one story and let that lead you to others.

I really enjoyed this writing about memoir. I ve just finished my own about my journey out of my city then out of my country to Egypt to study, Never Say Can’t, God Can Do It. Infact memoir writing helps to live the life you are writing about again and to appreciate good people you came across during the journey. Many thanks for sharing what memoir is about.

I am a survivor of gun violence, having witnessed my adult son being shot 13 times by police in 2014. I have struggled with writing my memoir because I have a grandson who was 18-months old at the time of the tragedy and was also present, as was his biological mother and other family members. We all struggle with PTSD because of this atrocity. My grandson’s biological mother was instrumental in what happened and I am struggling to write the story in such a way as to not cast blame – thus my dilemma in writing the memoir. My grandson was later adopted by a local family in an open adoption and is still a big part of my life. I have considered just writing it and waiting until my grandson is old enough to understand all the family dynamics that were involved. Any advice on how I might handle this challenge in writing would be much appreciated.

I decided to use a ghost writer, and I’m only part way in the process and it’s worth every penny!

Hi. I am 44 years old and have had a roller coaster life .. right as a young kid seeing his father struggle to financial hassles, facing legal battles at a young age and then health issues leading to a recent kidney transplant. I have been working on writing a memoir sharing my life story and titled it “A memoir of growth and gratitude” Is it a good idea to write a memoir and share my story with the world?

Thank you… this was very helpful. I’m writing about the troubling issues of my mental health, and how my life was seriously impacted by that. I am 68 years old.

[…] Writers.com: How to Write a Memoir […]

[…] Writers.com: “How to Write a Memoir” […]

I am so grateful that I found this site! I am inspired and encouraged to start my memoir because of the site’s content and the brave people that have posted in the comments.

Finding this site is going into my gratitude journey 🙂

We’re grateful you found us too, Nichol! 🙂

Firstly, I would like to thank you for all the info pertaining to memoirs. I believe am on the right track, am at the editing stage and really have to use an extra pair of eyes. I’m more motivated now to push it out and complete it. Thanks for the tips it was very helpful, I have a little more confidence it seeing the completion.

Well, I’m super excited to begin my memoir. It’s hard trying to rely on memories alone, but I’m going to give it a shot!

Thanks to everyone who posted comments, all of which have inspired me to get on it.

Best of luck to everyone! Jody V.

I was thrilled to find this material on How to Write A Memoir. When I briefly told someone about some of my past experiences and how I came to the United States in the company of my younger brother in a program with a curious name, I was encouraged by that person and others to write my life history.

Based on the name of that curious program through which our parents sent us to the United States so we could leave the place of our birth, and be away from potentially difficult situations in our country.

As I began to write my history I took as much time as possible to describe all the different steps that were taken. At this time – I have been working on this project for 5 years and am still moving ahead. The information I received through your material has further encouraged me to move along. I am very pleased to have found this important material. Thank you!

Wow! This is such an informative post packed with tangible guidance. I poured my heart into a book. I’ve been a professional creative for years to include as a writer, mainly in the ad game and content. No editor. I wasn’t trying to make it as an author. Looking back, I think it’s all the stuff I needed to say. Therapy. Which does not, in and of itself, make for a coherent book. The level of writing garnering praise, but the book itself was a hot mess. So, this is helpful. I really put myself out there, which I’ve done in many areas, but the crickets response really got to me this time. I bought “Educated” as you recommended. Do you have any blog posts on memoirs that have something to say to the world, finding that “something” to say? It feels like that’s theme, but perhaps something more granular. Thanks for this fantastic post. If I had the moola, I would sign up for a class. Your time is and effort is appreciated. Typos likely on comments! LOL

thanks. God bless

I am a member of the “Reprobates”, a group of seven retired Royal Air Force pilots and navigators which has stayed in intermittent touch since we first met in Germany in 1969. Four of the group (all of whom are in their late seventies or early eighties) play golf together quite frequently, and we all gather for reunions once or twice a year. About a year ago, one of the Reprobates suggested posterity might be glad to hear the stories told at these gatherings, and there have since been two professionally conducted recording sessions, one in London, and one in Tarifa, Spain. The instigator of these recordings forwarded your website to his fellow Reprobates by way of encouragement to put pen to paper. And, I, for one, have found it inspiring. It’s high time I made a start on my Memoirs, thank you.

Thank you for sharing this, Tim! Happy writing!

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Memoir vs. Autobiography: What’s the Difference?

They say everyone has a story to tell, and I absolutely believe that. But some folks have a story to tell about their own lives. They’ve experienced things and learned lessons that are worth sharing with other people.

That’s pretty freaking cool.

When you want to tell a personal narrative, you have a few options: a blog, a YouTube channel , even a diary. But if you want to turn it into a book, you have two options to consider:

A memoir or an autobiography.

While these two genres might seem similar, there are quite a number of meaningful differences you must know if you want to be successful in either—or if you just want to figure out what you’re going to write.

We’ll cover all that and more in this article. “And more” includes a history of these genres, tips for each, how to choose between memoir and autobiography writing, and pulling everything together.

You have that story to tell, so let’s figure out how to do it.

Defining Your Life Story: Memoirs and Autobiographies

Understanding the distinction between a memoir and an autobiography is a must for any writer venturing into personal narrative writing. 

While both genres share the common element of being based on the author's life experiences, the scope and focus of each are quite different.

Memoirs are a form of creative nonfiction where the writer shares specific experiences or periods from their life. These works are less about the chronology of the author's life and more about personal reflections, emotions, and insights. 

Memoirs often include a focus on specific themes or events, allowing the author to delve deeply into their experiences with a reflective and often emotional lens, and are written more like a fictional story than nonfiction.

Autobiographies, on the other hand, provide a more comprehensive view of the author's life. They typically follow a chronological format, documenting the author's life from early childhood to the present. 

Autobiographies are characterized by their detailed recounting of life events to encompass personal, professional, and sometimes public aspects of the author’s journey. The autobiography format emphasizes factual storytelling.

Memoir readers aren’t looking for a play-by-play of your life. They’re after the deeper meaning and themes behind your experiences and are more okay with stylistic choices and some interpretation of events.

Folks reading autobiographies are all about knowing what you did and why.

The History of Writing About A Person’s Life

While they’re both staples in modern literature, these genres have roots deeply embedded in history.

Which means as people, we like talking about ourselves.

That’s not a bad thing, don’t get me wrong; we all lead extraordinary, unique lives and have important things to share. And share we have.

Understanding how memoirs and autobiographies have been used historically can help us understand their current forms, too.

Memoirs have transformed quite a bit over time. Originating from the ancient practice of documenting noteworthy events (with that grandiose, fictional spin), they evolved during the Renaissance as a way for individuals to share their experiences and perspectives, often focusing on public life.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, memoirs became more personal, reflecting individual experiences and internal landscapes. This evolution paved the way for the modern memoir, which often blurs the lines between factual recounting and creative storytelling. Honestly, this works best for readers seeking emotional truth and personal growth.

Autobiographies have a lineage that can be traced back to religious and political leaders documenting their lives as a record of moral and ethical standards. You know, bragging about how good they are.

In the 18th century, with the rise of literacy and individualism, autobiographies became a tool for self-expression and identity exploration. This genre gained momentum in the 20th century, with notable figures from various fields chronicling their journeys, making it a popular way for exploring the complexities of human experience.

Both styles of work have been instrumental in our understanding of the past, too. Even memoirs, with their emphasis on storytelling, give us a glimpse into the lives of individuals and societies as a whole.

Writing a Memoir: Tips and Techniques

Diving into memoir writing can be equal parts thrilling and terrifying. It's not just about recounting events; it's about turning your experiences into a story that vibes with readers. 

Here are some tips and techniques to guide you:

• Find your focus - Unlike autobiographies, memoirs don't require you to detail your entire life. Pinpoint a specific theme, event, or period that holds significant meaning. This focus will be the heart of your memoir.
• Embrace emotional honesty - Memoirs thrive on emotional depth. Be honest about your feelings and experiences. This authenticity is what will connect with your readers.
• Show, don't just tell - Universally solid writing advice. Use descriptive language and sensory details to bring your story to life. Paint pictures with your words to immerse the reader in your world. Need some practice? Check out these worksheets .
• Incorporate reflective elements - A memoir is more than a series of events. It's an introspective journey. Reflect on your experiences, what you learned, and how they shaped you. This is what your readers are here for.

• Consider a non-linear structure - While some memoirs follow a chronological order, feel free to experiment with the structure. A non-linear approach can add intrigue and highlight how past events influence the present. Make sure to get lots of beta reader feedback to make sure your story still makes sense.
• Get personal, but stay relatable - While your memoir is deeply personal, aim to connect your experiences to universal themes. This relatability makes your story more impactful. Here’s a complete guide for writing themes .
• Revise with care - Memoirs often blend fact and narrative flair. In your revisions, balance creativity with accuracy. Remember, the essence of your truth is what matters most, so don’t let it get lost in your fictionalization.

Memoir writing is not just about telling your story; it's about sharing your perspective on life, with all its complexities and nuances. Each memoir is a unique window into a life, offering insights and reflections that no other story can.

My pal Abi has a great guide to writing memoirs you should bookmark if this is something you’re serious about.

Crafting an Autobiography: Structure and Elements

Writing an autobiography involves a different set of considerations compared to memoirs. It's about presenting the entirety of your life's journey with clarity and structure. 

Here are key elements and structural ideas to consider:

• Outline the chronology - Autobiographies typically follow a chronological order, leading your reader through your life's journey. Map out the key events from your early years to the present, creating a timeline that serves as your narrative backbone.
• Detail significant events - Highlight the pivotal moments in your life, both personal and professional. These events should not only tell what happened but also detail their impact and the lessons you learned from them.
• Develop a consistent theme - While covering all the cool stuff you’ve done (or things you’ve endured), maintain a consistent theme or message throughout your autobiography. This theme makes the whole story worth reading.
• Incorporate character development - Show how you evolved over time. This character arc is crucial in autobiographies because it shows how experiences shaped your personality, beliefs, and decisions.
• Be factual, yet engaging - Autobiographies require factual accuracy, but that doesn't mean they should be dry. Use engaging storytelling techniques to bring your experiences to life, making your narrative both informative and captivating. Here’s an article to help you focus on your prose.
• Include supporting characters - Your life's story is also about the people who influenced you. Include these characters, describing their roles and the dynamics in your relationships with them. An autobiography is still a story, and supporting characters make stories great.
• Reflect on your journey - Offer reflections on your experiences, providing insights into how they influenced your current perspective. This reflective angle adds depth to the factual recounting of events and should be directly tied to your themes.
• Edit for coherence and clarity - Ensure that your autobiography is not just a collection of events but a cohesive tale. In editing , focus on clarity, coherence, and the overall flow of your story.

Crafting an autobiography is an opportunity to not only share your life story but also to reflect on the journey and its broader implications. It's a chance to offer a detailed, introspective look at the milestones that have defined you.

Which, admittedly, sounds intimidating, but putting in the effort can result in a book that changes both your life and a reader’s.

Choosing Your Approach to Creative Nonfiction

When it comes to sharing your life story, deciding between a memoir and an autobiography isn’t always an easy decision. This choice influences not only the structure and focus of your work but also how your readers will connect with your story. 

Here are some considerations to help you decide:

Understand your objective - Consider what you wish to achieve with your book. Are you looking to explore a particular aspect of your life with emotional depth (memoir) or do you intend to provide a comprehensive account of your life’s journey (autobiography)?

Assess your content - Reflect on the events and experiences you want to share. A memoir suits a more focused, thematic exploration, while an autobiography is ideal for a broader, chronological recounting.

Consider your audience - Think about who you're writing for. Memoir readers choose their books because they’re interested in the theme, topic, or story rather than the person. Autobiography readers tend to make purchases based on who they’re reading about. If you don’t have some fame or following, an autobiography might be a hard sell.

Reflect on your writing style - Your natural writing style can also guide your choice. If you lean towards reflective, emotive storytelling, a memoir might be your forté. If you're more comfortable with factual, chronological narratives, consider an autobiography.

Flexibility vs. structure - Memoirs offer more creative flexibility in structure and storytelling, allowing for a more literary approach. Autobiographies, being more factual and chronological, require a structured approach to storytelling.

Personal comfort - Consider your comfort level with vulnerability and personal disclosure. Memoirs require a deeper dive into personal experiences and emotions. Autobiographies, while personal, can let you use a more observational tone.

Remember, the choice between a memoir and an autobiography is not just about the story you want to tell but about how you want to tell that story. Your decision will shape both the way you write your story and how your readers interpret it.

Best Practices for Personal Narrative Writing

Whether you choose to write a memoir or an autobiography, certain best practices can enhance your storytelling and connect more deeply with your readers. 

First, stay authentic . Authenticity is the cornerstone of personal narrative writing. Your readers are seeking truth in your story, even if it's presented through a subjective lens. Be genuine in your recounting, and don't shy away from your unique voice.

You also want to engage your readers emotionally . Whether it's through humor, sorrow, inspiration, or reflection, emotional resonance makes your story memorable and impactful. One of the best ways to suck them in is to use descriptive language to create vivid scenes and characters. This immerses the reader in your world, making your experiences and memories come alive.

Remember, these are both still stories and thus have a cohesive plot. Ensure your story has a clear beginning, middle, and end . Even if you choose a non-linear structure, maintaining a coherent narrative flow is essential for keeping your readers engaged. If you need some help with story structure, you know we have your back with this guide .

Dialogue can be a powerful tool in personal narratives. It brings dynamism to the story and offers insights into characters and relationships. Don’t neglect good dialogue just because you aren’t writing fiction.

Personal narratives aren’t just about what happened; they’re about what those events mean. Include your reflections and analysis to provide depth and context to your experiences, but do it in a way that flows and feels natural. This is obviously more important in memoirs, but your autobiography needs to have reflection, too.

Finally, when writing about real people and events, consider the implications of sharing private information. Respect the privacy of others and navigate sensitive topics with care.

Personal narrative writing is a journey of exploration, both for you as a writer and for your readers. By incorporating these best practices, you can create a story that’s not only engaging and informative but also profoundly moving.

And that’s the whole point.

Reflective Writing and Authorial Perspective in Personal Narratives

The heart of a compelling personal story, be it a memoir or an autobiography, lies in its reflective writing and your authorial perspective. These are the elements that make memoirs and autobiographies unique from other genres. And it’s what our readers are looking for. 

Here are five final tips to make best use of these elements:

Embrace reflective writing - Reflective writing involves looking back at your experiences and analyzing their impact. It's about understanding the why behind the what. This critical thinking transforms your writing from a simple plot into a journey of personal growth and understanding.

Cultivate a strong authorial voice - While an author’s voice is always important, it does extra work with these genres. It conveys your unique perspective and personality. A strong, consistent voice helps readers connect with your story on a deeper level. And, if you need help refining or developing your voice and tone, click here .

Integrate insights and learnings - Your story should offer insights and learnings, not just for yourself but also for your readers. Share the wisdom gained from your trials and adventures. Turn your personal journey into a relatable, universal tale of human experience.

Use reflection to drive the narrative - Let your reflections and insights drive the plot forward. Your personal growth is just as important in these stories as a fictional character’s arc is in a fantasy epic or hockey romcom. What you learn and realize should push the plot.

Engage the reader with thoughtful questions - Sometimes, posing questions can be more powerful than providing answers. Use reflective questions to engage your readers and prompt them to think about their own experiences and perspectives.

Memoirs and Autobiographies are Still Stories

I know I’ve said this a bunch of times already, but this is something you need to permanently imprint in your writing brain: both memoirs and autobiographies rely on the same core elements as any other story.

It doesn’t matter that they’re based on real life. You still need to understand plot, character development, themes, settings, conflicts, metaphors, point of view, writing habits, and so much more. Then you need to layer everything we’ve discussed here on top of that.

I mentioned equal parts thrilling and terrifying before, right?

Don’t worry, though, because we’ve got you covered. I’ve already given you a bunch of links to relevant guides in this article, but you’ll find hundreds—yes, I’m talking triple digits!—for free over at DabbleU .

And speaking of free, you can click here to get a 100+ page e-book to help you go from idea to finished draft, also for zero dollars and zero cents. Now the only thing left to do is tell your life’s story.

Thrilling. Terrifying. Pretty dang cool.

Doug Landsborough can’t get enough of writing. Whether freelancing as an editor, blog writer, or ghostwriter, Doug is a big fan of the power of words. In his spare time, he writes about monsters, angels, and demons under the name D. William Landsborough. When not obsessing about sympathetic villains and wondrous magic, Doug enjoys board games, horror movies, and spending time with his wife, Sarah.

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Autobiography Writing Guide

Autobiography Vs Memoir

Last updated on: Feb 9, 2023

Autobiography vs. Memoir: Definitions & Writing Tips

By: Barbara P.

Reviewed By: Chris H.

Published on: Mar 2, 2021

Autobiography and memoirs are written to tell the life story of the writer. An  autobiography  covers the author’s whole life, while a memoir focuses on specific events. These two terms are used interchangeably, but there are obvious and practical differences between the two similar genres.

Writing a memoir and autobiography is a creatively challenging experience, even for the most experienced of writers.

Therefore, read on this blog and get to know the difference and similarities between autobiography vs. memoir.

On this Page

Definition of Memoir vs. Autobiography

The memoir and autobiography are the terms that overlap each other, so the confusion is understandable. These two are the formats that are used to tell a creative non-fiction story. However, there are some differences that you need to know before using the most appropriate one.

Let us discuss the definition of both in detail.

A memoir is based on the author’s real-life experience, and it is written from the author’s point of view. Also, they are not covering their whole life from birth to the present. However, they explore a specific era in great detail, which makes them much different from other writing genres.

Memoirs are more personal and focused on the writer's life. It should be written from the first-person point of view.

The main purpose of the memoir is to:

• Share your personal life experience with the readers.
• Tell the story from the author’s perspective.
• Connect with others who have similar or the same situations.
• Help the people to understand that they are not alone in their experiences.
• Make sense of the threads and themes of their life, as well as identify what's important.

Moreover, the memoir is a type of autobiography that gives a glimpse of the specific event of the writer’s life. Also, the memoir should be:

• Descriptive
• Well-written

The memoir also focuses on the relationship between the author and a particular place or person. Also, they tend to be read more like a fiction novel than a factual account. It includes the following things:

However, for a great memoir, you should share snippets from their life. Also, do not try to tell the entire story in one sitting.

Here is an example that gives you a better idea of the memoir.

Memoir Example

Autobiography

An autobiography focuses on the writer’s entire life and discusses the significant events of their life. It comes through the writer’s own life and in his own words. People write autobiographies to record their feelings and ideas to share with others. Then get it published to reach a greater number of people.

The main purpose of the autobiography is to:

• Inform or teach someone about something.
• Present the facts based on a memoir.
• Focus on the most important events and people in the writer’s life.
• Give you a better insight into how their experiences have shaped them as a person.

Moreover, an autobiography is written in a fictional tale that closely mirrors events from the author’s real life. However, your autobiography should be:

• Easy to read
• Free from obscure details

The below example will help you in writing a good autobiography.

Autobiography Example

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Autobiography vs. Memoir: Differences and Similarities

The autobiography and memoir have some differences and similarities. You must know them before you start writing it.

The below table shows the differences between autobiography and memoir.

Here are some similarities between autobiography and memoir.

• Both use the first-person point of view.
• Both demonstrate the life of the author.
• Focus on the limited aspect of the author’s life.
• Nonfiction literary genre.
• Presents facts as the person experiencing them.

Biography vs. Autobiography vs. Memoir

Some students get confused between biography, autobiography, and memoir. They are not the same and are written for different purposes.

Check the below table and better understand the similarities and differences between biography, autobiography, and memoir.

Memoir vs. Autobiography vs. Personal Narrative

The below table shows the differences and similarities between memoir, autobiography, and personal narrative.

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Tips for Writing the Autobiography and Memoir

The following are the tips that you should follow and create a well-written autobiography and memoir.

• Use fiction-writing techniques.
• Write in an engaging way.
• Mention the specific dates of the events.
• Focused on facts.
• Dialogues in memoir should be natural instead of journalistic.
• Do in-depth research.
• Start with a strong hook.
• Use the correct memoir and  autobiography format .
• Pick a strong theme.
• Focus on the main events of the person’s life.

Now, you get a complete understanding of the autobiography and memoir. However, if there is still any confusion in writing, then simply consult 5StarEssays.com.

Our  essay writer  will help you make your writing process easy. All your write my essay requests are managed by professional writers.

So, contact us now and get professional academic help at an affordable rate.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the 3 characteristics of a memoir.

The 3 characteristics are:

• It focuses on a specific life event
• The subject becomes alive in the writing
• They are more limited than biographies

Is a memoir more factual than an autobiography?

No! On the contrary, an autobiography is more factual than a memoir. An autobiography encompasses many facts and real incidents from one’s life.

Can we use memoir and autobiography interchangeably?

In some instances, when autobiographies become exceedingly short, they are often called memoirs. However, they are still different in their essence and purpose.

Literature, Marketing

Dr. Barbara is a highly experienced writer and author who holds a Ph.D. degree in public health from an Ivy League school. She has worked in the medical field for many years, conducting extensive research on various health topics. Her writing has been featured in several top-tier publications.

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• How to Write an Autobiography - A Complete Guide

• Autobiography Examples – Detailed Outline and Samples

• Know the Different Types of Autobiography Here

• Autobiography Format for Students - A Detailed Guide

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What Are the Major Differences Between Memoir and Autobiography?

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

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Feeling confused about the difference between memoir and autobiography? You’re not the only one. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, and there is a lot of overlap between the two, so confusion is understandable. But there are some basic differences that will help you distinguish between them and make sure you are using the most appropriate word. Knowing the difference will help you choose what to read, as well: you should know what you are getting into when you pick up a book labeled memoir vs. autobiography.

First, let’s discuss similarities between the two. Both autobiography and memoir are first-person accounts of the writer’s life. This means the writer is describing her or his life using “I” and “me” (“I did this, then this happened to me,” etc.) One exception to this is that sometimes autobiographies are written in the third person (where the author refers to him or herself as “he” or “she”), but this is not common and rarely seen in contemporary writing. Mostly, both genres are about writers telling readers about their lives in their own voice.

That’s pretty simple. What’s trickier is figuring out what makes these genres different. So here’s a breakdown of the difference between memoir and autobiography, that I’ll discuss more below.

Memoir vs. Autobiography Basics

1. autobiography usually covers the author’s entire life up to the point of writing, while memoir focuses only on a part of the author’s life..

There are going to be exceptions to every point on this list, but generally speaking, autobiography aims to be comprehensive, while memoir does not. Autobiographers set out to tell the story of their life, and while some parts will get more detail than others, they usually cover most or all of it.

Memoirists will often choose a particularly important or interesting part of their life to write about and ignore or briefly summarize the rest. They will sometimes choose a theme or subject and tell stories from different parts of their life that illustrate its significance to them.

As examples,  The Autobiography of Malcolm X  covers the major points of Malcolm X’s life, while  Abandon Me: A Memoir by Melissa Febos focuses mainly on two significant relationships (with her father and with a lover).

2. In autobiography, authors usually tell their life stories because they are famous and important. A memoirist can be anybody, famous or not.

Long Walk to Freedom,  Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, is a good example: he was an important person whose personal account of his life matters because of who he was and everything he accomplished.

For memoir, Mary Karr’s  The Liar’s Club is not the story of a famous person; instead, it’s an account of a regular person’s childhood. Her childhood was especially eventful, but it doesn’t stand out because she was famous. Memoirists do sometimes become famous, but usually it’s for writing memoirs.

3. People read autobiographies because they want to know about a particular (probably famous) person. They read memoirs because they are interested in a certain subject or story or they are drawn to the writer’s style or voice.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is a book people might read because they want to learn about an important historical figure. They may also have heard it’s exceptionally interesting and well-written, but the desire to learn about a person who shaped U.S. history is probably the main motivation.

On the other hand, readers may pick up Roxane Gay’s memoir  Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body because they want to read about food, weight, and body image. Or they may admire Gay’s essays available online and want to explore more of her work. The motivation here is more about subject and style and less about the writer as a historical or cultural figure.

4. Autobiographies tend to be written in chronological order, while memoirs often move back and forth in time.

When readers pick up an autobiography, they expect it to begin with the author’s childhood (or perhaps even with the author’s parents’ lives), to proceed through young adulthood and middle age, through to the time of the writing. Olaudah Equiano’s  The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano  does just that, opening with his childhood and proceeding in a straightforward manner through time.

Memoirs, on the other hand, can be much looser in their treatment of time.  Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot shifts back and forth in time and has a structure more focused on theme than chronology. We finish the book with a sense of the major events of Mailhot’s life, but not necessarily their order.

5. Autobiography places greater emphasis on facts and how the writer fits into the historical record, while memoir emphasizes personal experience and interiority.

Autobiographies are sometimes thought of as a form of history and they are used as source material for historians. While it’s possible for both autobiographers and memoirists to get their facts wrong, the stakes are higher for the autobiographer who made history or witnessed historically-important events.

Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass  is important in part because of Douglass’s work as an orator, statesman, and abolitionist. His historical stature adds to the significance of his book.

The facts matter in memoir, but it’s understood that memoirists select and shape the facts of their lives to explore their chosen theme. Darin Strauss’s  Half a Life: A Memoir is rooted in a real-life event—a car crash in which Strauss accidentally hit and killed a classmate—but it focuses on the emotional aftereffects of this event rather than the historical context of Strauss’s life.

And there you have it! Again, these distinctions are loose ones, but hopefully they have helped you understand the different connotations of the two words.

Want to read more about memoir? Check out this list of 100 must-read memoirs , this discussion of how to define the term “memoir,” and this post on short memoirs .

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Memoir vs. Autobiography: What Are the Differences?

by Chris Snellgrove

Thinking of writing about your life? In that case, you have a choice to make: a memoir or an autobiography? Each of these types of writing represents a different way to tell your life story.

Often, people hoping to commit their life stories into a book don’t know the difference between autobiography vs. memoir. But once you understand the key differences, you’ll be able to get started writing your emotional truth for the world to see.

What’s the difference between a memoir and an autobiography?

Memoirs and autobiographies are both nonfiction narratives written by the person that they’re about. Autobiographies encompass the entirety of a person’s life story, while memoirs focus on just one powerful experience or a group of experiences. Memoirs cover less time than autobiographies, and are often about conveying a particular message, rather than simply overviewing someone’s life.

We’ll dig deeper into both autobiographies and memoirs below.

What is an autobiography?

An autobiography is a first-person work of nonfiction that’s meant to cover an author’s entire life . Because of this, many choose to write autobiographies later in life when they have more of a life story to share.

You don’t have to be famous to write an autobiography. However, it can be a tough sell convincing the average reader to dive into a subject’s entire life if the subject isn’t someone they’ve heard of before. Having heard of the subject before makes reading about that person’s life seem more interesting.

If you’re not famous, you’ll just need to find a unique perspective or slant to make an engaging story out of your life.

How is an autobiography structured?

Most autobiographies are written in chronological order. This means your autobiography will be an entertaining and detailed chronology of your entire life from beginning to end.

Even though you’re writing creative nonfiction, a reader expects the same things from a good autobiography that he expects from any other narrative: an interesting series of events told in a gripping manner. Once you have this foundation in place , your autobiography should focus on the most important moments in your life.

It all starts with you plumbing your own memories so that you can establish important details like setting, characters, background, and so on. You may need to engage in meticulous research into your own family history to get all of the info you need. You’re basically the main character of your own story, and readers want to know more about the major events that shaped you into who you are today.

Since this may mean revisiting some of dark moments, an autobiography may quickly become a more sensitive work than you were expecting. Some writers turn to creative nonfiction in order to process trauma or difficult memories, and you might find this a helpful practice for you.

Your autobiography should end with you reflecting on what you have learned from each personal experience—coming to the end of your own Hero’s Journey . That means writing the book is a great way for you to examine how different life experiences shaped you as a person. Now, the conclusion to the book is when you share in your own words what you have discovered about yourself!

Examples of autobiographies

As we’ve noted, an autobiography often features famous people and tells the story of the author’s life up to that point. As a result, famous names and faces comprise many of the best autobiography examples throughout history.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is one of the most well-read autobiographies in the world. It helps that Douglass had such an impressive story to share with the world!

Before that, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin was a best-seller. Who wouldn’t want to learn more about one of the most famous Founding Fathers?

Some other popular autobiographies include The Story of My Life by Helen Keller and The Autobiography of Malcolm X . While you don’t technically have to be famous person to write an autobiography, these examples show that it doesn’t hurt!

What is a memoir?

A memoir is a nonfiction book written in the first person that conveys your impression of certain memories over a limited amount of time . In this way, memoirs are very different than autobiographies, and may be more stylized.

While an autobiography covers the author’s life from a very young age to the present day—the full expanse of their experience—a memoir may instead focus on a shorter period of time, like the author’s teenage years or their career in a particular industry.

Some writers find memoirs easier to map out, because creating an interesting narrative about a person’s entire life is difficult—even if it’s your own! It may also be easier to attract readers with a memoir than with an autobiography. That’s because someone may overlook an autobiography if it isn’t by someone they recognize, but memoirs focus on interesting experiences can feel more accessible.

Before you start to write your own memoir, though, it’s important to understand the structure of this kind of narrative.

How is a memoir structured?

Memoirs provide a more flexible way to share your life story with others. You have more options when it comes to what the memoir focuses on and how you assemble your life stories into a compelling narrative.

You might write your narrative in the same chronological order that you would write a typical autobiography or fiction book. But in this case, the principle difference between autobiography and memoir is that the memoir is focused on a shorter time period. So instead of writing your story from childhood to present, you might recount your experience through your university years.

You can also write a memoir as a series of flashbacks, where the narrative bounces from the past to the present. This technique is very effective in showing how a person’s life and thoughts have changed over time.

Sometimes, the tale of the author’s life focuses on how they overcame a specific obstacle. This type of memoir functions as a kind of extended personal essay about the subject’s life and struggles. This can help you process and share difficult experiences.

While memoirs may have subjective elements as part of the memories and impressions that are recounted, it’s important that memoirs about overcoming difficulties represent a true story of your life. Otherwise, you risk the scandal that A Million Little Pieces provoked when it was revealed that author James Frey fictionalized much of it. (Alternatively, you could just change one or two names and call it a novel instead!)

Once you settle on how to structure your memoir, make sure it includes all of the necessary elements of any good story. For memoir and autobiography, this will usually include a first-person point of view (rather than a third person, or he/she, perspective), a cohesive story built around a theme, and a well-written tale of you overcoming obstacles while being emotionally open and vulnerable during the writing process.

Examples of memoirs

If you’re not among the famous historical figures over the years, a memoir might be a better choice than an autobiography. Memoir authors know their book will be less about celebrity gossip and more about telling a good story.

One of the most popular memoirs is Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast , a personal account of his time in Paris. A more modern memoir that kicked off an entire lifestyle is Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia .

David Sedaris helped to redefine emotional rawness in his amazing memoir Me Talk Pretty One Day . Should you ever doubt how influential a memoir can be, look no further than Piper Kerman. After all, her Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison spawned an insanely-successful television show on Netflix!

Should I write a memoir or an autobiography?

Now you know the key difference between a memoir and autobiography. This leads us to the big question: between memoir and an autobiography, which one should you write?

If you’re looking for book sales, the better choice is usually a memoir. While the publishing industry loves churning out tell-alls from celebrities, they’re more cautious when it comes to championing an autobiography written by someone relatively unknown.

Furthermore, many writers prefer memoirs over autobiographies because they can focus more on subjective impressions rather than objective accounts. In other words, autobiographies tend to be about specific dates and facts; memoirs are explorations of personal experiences.

Finally, memoirs are more accessible for younger writers. Instead of waiting until you’re older and have more lived experience to share, you can focus on a specific event, experience, or perspective that you think will resonate with many different lives.

How to write an autobiography

As long as there are personal stories to tell, there will be plenty of autobiographies. But what separates a great autobiography from a bad one?

Good autobiographies starts with meticulous planning. We’re going to walk you through a step-by-step process that shows you exactly how you can get started.

Start with a good hook

Even being famous doesn’t guarantee readers will want to learn more about someone’s life. In order to get readers interested, you need to have a good hook.

Consider what sort of interesting things make your story unique. Did you spend time with someone famous in your line of work? Do you have insight into a cool, fascinating industry? Or did you overcome a seemingly insurmountable obstacle?

Whatever your hook, it’s a good idea to incorporate it into the title of your autobiography. For example, Maya Angelou’s famous I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings uses the evocative title to also describe the emotional truths that she discovered and unpacked throughout the book.

Craft a satisfying overall narrative

While this is easier said than done, solid autobiographical writing has to have an engaging narrative. In other words, it’s one thing for authors to write about their lives. It’s another thing for everything written to be entertaining!

Imagine the different people who populate your book as characters in a work of fiction. How will you describe their appearance, actions, and personalities? Interesting characters and relatable dialogue may make the difference between compelling writing and boring writing.

At its heart, though, the book will be about your own specific theme and conflicts as you overcome your obstacles. Again, you’re the hero of this book: time to make the story of your life something others want to read!

Map out a clear timeline

Compared to memoirs, which can be narratively experimental, autobiographies have a straightforward layout. Everything is written in chronological order. That’s why it’s so important to establish a clear timeline of events.

If you’ve never written an autobiography, you may think this means the author writes everything off the top of their head. In reality, the process can involve a lot of research to get important dates just right. Before you begin writing, put together an outline of important dates and events you want to touch on in your story (this can be a good practice for fiction, too !)

When the timeline of your book is clear, you make it easier for others to read and understand your story. When the timeline isn’t clear, though, your readers may just be left scratching their heads in confusion!

Conduct extensive research

We already touched on this, but once again: an autobiography requires a lot of research. It may be a very different process than what you’re used to in your other writing!

That’s because you can’t just rely on things like Google when it comes to your own life. You’re going to need to interview family members and friends, dig through old photo boxes, and learn as much about different eras of your life as possible.

How to write a memoir

Compared to an autobiography, a memoir isn’t just a historical account of your life. Rather, it’s a subjective peek into some of the most raw and formative experiences you have encountered.

Fortunately, there are a few key ingredients to writing solid memoirs. These tips will help you hit the ground running when you decide to sit down and write!

Develop a powerful theme

Themes are an element of autobiographical writing, but they aren’t at the centre of the narrative. In memoirs, though, a powerful theme is the most important way to help your story stand out.

Again, it helps to think like a fiction writer when developing this theme. Is this a story of a person succeeding an unforgiving world? A heartbreaking work of someone learning brutal lessons about love? Or maybe a coming-of-age story where someone’s forced to grow up too soon?

With memoirs, you have the freedom of focusing on only one part of your life. Be sure to develop a powerful theme and use it to unify the rest of the narrative.

Highlight its universal appeal

While it’s easier said than done, a good memoir needs to have universal appeal. In other words, no matter how fantastic your tale is, there should be something any reader can relate to.

For example, nobody else may have endured the exact heartbreak you did, but everyone has suffered from a broken heart at least once. Because of this, tales of love lost always find an audience.

Everyone has failed at something and then tried to make a comeback. Because of this, tales of redemption have a universal appeal.

By choosing a theme that’s universally resonant, you can gain the largest possible audience for your memoir.

Balance facts and personal reflection

Though known for poetry rather than memoirs, Emily Dickinson offers memoir writers some great advice: “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.”

As we noted, it’s important for memoirs to convey true events. If the events aren’t true, then memoirs lose all their appeal and become just another kind of fiction.

However, memoirs are more personal than autobiographies are. This gives you room to reflect on different people and experiences through a more subjective lens. By combining interesting stories with engaging reflections, you can keep readers captivated.

Begin writing the story of your life

Memoirs and autobiographies offer different ways to share your life with the world. While these primary formats for writing about yourself share some similarities, there are key differences that may influence your choice.

Once you have decided on which medium is right for you, you may be surprised at how rewarding writing about your life can be. This way, you also leave a powerful legacy for future readers to discover.

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Memoir vs. Autobiography: Navigating the Differences Between Personal Life Stories

• September 28, 2023

Table of Contents:

What exactly is a memoir, what does an autobiography mean, potential differences between memoir vs. autobiography:, perspective:, autobiography:, narrative style:, key characteristics and profound details, final words:.

The difference between an autobiography and a memoir is often misunderstood. Both are based on real events and characters but follow distinct plot lines and narrative frameworks.

Understanding the distinction between memoir vs. autobiography is crucial to creating a story based on your experiences.

It is more personal and close than an autobiography. The word “memoir,” which comes from the French word mémoire and means “memory” or “reminisce,” is also used. Many people like it because it lets authors use their life experiences to write a story that helps or inspires others.

Memoirs can be about a lot of different things. You can write about your youth, an important event as an author, or any other time that made you who you are now.

Understanding the differences between memoir vs. autobiography is another great way to describe yourself. It’s okay to talk about what you know about yourself. Furthermore, you can discuss issues that interest you and your audience.

When someone writes about their life, it’s a personal story. You observe your life when you write a book because you lived it.

Its roots are in the Greek words “auto” and “graphy,” which mean “self-writing” or “writing about oneself.” It tells about the author’s family history, relationships, schooling, and work, among other things.

An autobiography tells stories from the first-person point of view. A famous person, like a leader, artist, scientist, or teacher, usually writes it. There are many reasons to write it; you can also consider autobiography writing services for error-free writing.

Some writers also use it to talk about their political or religious ideas. Some people use it to get the word about their ideas, goods, or services.

Memoir and autobiography are both genres of literature that tell the story of someone’s life, but they have distinct differences in focus, scope, and narrative style.

Below are some prominent differences between memoir vs. autobiography:

• Well-known individuals, such as public figures, celebrities, or historical figures, often write autobiographies.
• They provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of the author’s life, covering everything from childhood to adulthood.
• The narrative typically follows a chronological order, presenting a factual and detailed account of events.
• Autobiographies often aim to offer insight into the author’s character, motivations, and the influences that shaped them.
• On the other hand, memoirs can be written by individuals from various backgrounds and may not necessarily be widely known.
• A memoir focuses on a specific aspect of the author’s life, such as a particular period, a significant event, or a theme like personal growth or overcoming challenges.
• Memoirs may not follow a strictly chronological structure; instead, they may use a more thematic or narrative-driven approach.
• Authors of memoirs often reflect on the meaning and significance of their experiences, providing a more subjective and personal perspective.
• Autobiographies aim to cover the entire span of the author’s life, offering a comprehensive overview.
• Readers can expect a detailed account of the author’s major life events, achievements, and relationships.
• The broad scope allows for a comprehensive understanding of the author’s life journey.
• Memoirs have a narrower scope, focusing on specific aspects of the author’s life.
• This narrower focus allows for a more in-depth exploration of particular themes, experiences, or relationships.
• The author may choose to understand deeply about a particular period or significant life event, providing a more detailed memoir writing insights and intimate portrayal.
• Autobiographies often adopt a formal and objective tone.
• The narrative style tends to prioritize straightforwardly presenting factual information.
• Emotions and personal reflections may be present but are typically secondary to providing a comprehensive account.
• Memoirs are characterized by a more subjective and reflective narrative style.
• Authors may delve into their emotions, thoughts, and personal insights, offering readers a more intimate connection to shared experiences.
• The writing style of Book Writing Founders in memoirs is often more literary and creative, allowing for a deeper exploration of the author’s perspective.
• The purpose of understanding memoir vs. autobiography is to comprehensively document and share the author’s life story.
• Autobiographies may serve historical or cultural purposes, providing insights into a particular period or social context.
• They aim to leave a lasting record of the author’s life for future generations.
• Memoirs have a more focused purpose, aiming to explore and convey a particular theme or set of experiences.
• The goal is often to provide readers with a more personal and emotional connection to the author’s journey.
• Memoirs can inspire, educate, or resonate with readers who may relate to the shared experiences on a more intimate level.
• Autobiographies often appeal to readers interested in the complete life story of a well-known individual.
• Readers may be drawn to autobiographies for historical insights, to better understand influential figures, or simply to satisfy curiosity about the author’s life.
• Memoirs appeal to a broader range of authors and readers.
• Anyone with a compelling and personal story can write a memoir, regardless of their public profile. You can also search some professional memoir writing services to entertain your audience.
• Readers of memoirs often seek a more emotional and personal connection to the author’s experiences, and they may be drawn to specific themes or relatable life events.

Memoirs vs. autobiographies share the purpose of narrating personal life stories; they differ in scope, perspective, writing style, and intended audience. Understanding these differences can help you determine which genre aligns better with the story you want to tell and the impact you want to make on readers.

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Autobiography vs Memoir: Which One Should You Write?

POSTED ON Jul 27, 2023

Written by Sarah Rexford

There is often a lot of confusion when it comes an autobiography vs memoir. While both are true stories about an individual, they share different story arcs and structures.

If you want to write a story about your life, it's important to understand the difference between memoir and autobiography, which is what we will delve into today. After you read our article on autobiography vs memoir, you'll be able to write your life story with clarity and confidence.

Maybe your life story is unique. You want to share it and leave a lasting legacy behind. Well, it’s time to start the process. It’s time to write your story. 

Before sitting down to write, it’s important to articulate to yourself what you specifically want to share and why. Just as writing a fiction book demands planning and deciding exactly where to start and what theme to write about, so does writing your life story. 

Whatever your story is, it will likely fall under the category of memoir or autobiography. 

The most important choice to make prior to writing your opening sentence is deciding which genre (in the giant list of book genres ) you are going to share your story through.

It’s crucial to choose the correct genre in which to tell your story. Autobiographies vs memoirs each have different purposes. 

Using an autobiography when you want to communicate your memoir is similar to filming a documentary when you want to film a drama. 

Documentaries usually cover many details of a specific time period and are told through a linear fashion. They start at a single point in time and work their way to the end of a time period or to the present day.

Dramas focus on a theme and use specific aspects of a person’s life to articulate and highlight this theme. 

Autobiographies vs memoirs are much the same. 

Need A Nonfiction Book Outline?

This autobiography vs memoir guide will cover:

Autobiography vs memoir: the difference explained.

While both genres are personal stories, the difference between memoir and autobiography is distinct.

According to Merriam-Webster, a memoir is, “A narrative composed from personal experience” and an autobiography is, “The biography of a person narrated by that person, a usually written account of a person's life in their own words.” 

In the publishing world, a memoir is a book about you that is focused on the reader. In other words, it’s pieces of your life story written with the intention of communicating a specific message to a specific audience. 

An autobiography is your life story from birth to present day, including all major events, without too much thought for theme. 

The purpose of an autobiography is simply to communicate your life story . 

The purpose of a memoir is to communicate a theme, and use stories from your life to do so.

This is the main difference between memoir and autobiography.

Both memoirs and autobiographies should be written with the focus on the reader, however. Writing succeeds because of readers. Whether you’re covering your life from birth to now, or sharing specific stories, keep the reader at the forefront of your mind at all times. 

The more you think “reader first” the better your writing will be, regardless of whether you are writing an autobiography vs memoir. 

When should I write an autobiography vs memoir?

Celebrities and well-known figures often communicate their life stories through autobiographies, while lesser known individuals communicate a theme through specific stories from their lives. 

The public wants to know the details of celebrities’ lives and is willing and eager to read through all the details of their growing up years, young adult successes and failures, and all the way to the present day.

Individuals with less of a public presence who still have valuable stories, information, or an important theme to share, may want to do so through memoirs. This way they can still communicate their message, but use life stories that directly apply to this message to do so.

Learning how to write a memoir allows you to use anecdotes from your life to communicate your theme. Remember, if you aren’t a household name, readers are unlikely to be interested in your stories if they don’t provide some type of value.

Always think reader-first with these questions:

• Is your theme focused on helping the reader?
• What stories contribute to the power of your theme?
• What stories distract from your theme and shift the focus to you? 
• Will your reader walk away feeling empowered or inspired? 

When writing an autobiography, it’s still important to think of the reader first. But readers are more likely to expect stories that focus on your life and the interesting things you’ve done in an autobiography vs memoir.

If you are a celebrity or household name, writing your autobiography is likely the way to go. Otherwise, you should use creative nonfiction writing skills to make your memoir as interesting and impactful as possible.

Two things to remember when writing your life story

Whether you are writing an autobiography vs memoir, here are two important things to consider:

1. Portray the basic essence of life events

While autobiographies and memoirs are about your life and your interactions, achievements, goals, failures, etc., it’s impossible to remember every word of dialogue you and others have spoken. Readers understand that exact wording has been written to the best of your memory, but is not exact.

Be careful to write in a way that reflects the attitudes and intentions of the dialogue in that moment, however many years ago it took place, but rest assured the dialogue in memoirs and autobiographies cannot be completely accurate. 

Sharing your story with the world is a bold step. It’s brave to think through your life and write it all down for hundreds (if not millions) to read.

As you plunge into your story, whether it be autobiography vs memoir, writing, editing, and eventually self-publishing it will take time. Don’t get discouraged if you need to rearrange parts, chop large portions, or add stories when you think you are finished. 

Writing your story takes time . It’s your life, after all! Just make sure you capture the basic essence of your life events in an authentic manner.

2. Change names of people and locations

While I just said to be authentic, it's also important to have some protections in place.

Whether you write an autobiography vs memoir, protect yourself and others by changing names, locations, and any other detail as you see fit. You can make a simple note at the front of your book explaining that some details have been changed to protect individuals. The last thing you want is to be accused of libel or slander the week your book comes out. 

As you work towards your book launch , enjoy the process. Writing your story is something many dream of, few start, and even less complete. You didn’t just have the dream, you saw it through to its completion. 

You took a big step. Whether you chose to embark on an autobiography vs memoir, you are writing your story and putting it out into the world. Your legacy will have the possibility of impacting countless individuals around the world for years to come – and that's extremely exciting!

If you're still not certain on the difference between an autobiography vs memoir (or if what you are writing is an autobiography vs memoir) let's take a look at some examples of each.

Examples of memoirs

If you plan to write your memoir, reading other successful memoirs is a great place to start.

Here are some examples to get you started:

• O n Writing: A Memoir of the Craft , by Stephen King
• The Glass Castle , by Jeannette Walls
• Writing For the Soul , by Jerry B. Jenkins
• All Over but the Shoutin’ , by Rick Bragg
• Running for My Life , by Lopez Lomong

As you read, focus on what the theme is, what stories the author uses to illustrate this theme, and how the story isn’t focused just on the author, but on you, the reader.

Again, think reader first.

It may be helpful to take notes so that when it’s time to write your own memoir, you have examples to refer back to as needed. This will help you when you feel stuck or unsure of which stories to use. 

You can also reference our memoir outline to help you in your writing process.

Examples of autobiographies 

If, on the other hand, you decide to write your autobiography vs memoir, you’ll want to brush up on autobiographies and biographies instead. 

Whether you pick up an autobiography or a biography, the same lessons can be learned: 

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave , by Frederick Douglass
• Autobiography of Mark Twain , Samuel Clemmons 
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , by James Agee
• Churchill: A Life , by Martin Gilbert

As you write your autobiography, remember that although it is about you, you should still think reader first. Write in a way that readers will be able to easily understand and follow. Starting at birth and moving forward chronologically will likely work well when writing an autobiography vs memoir.

Share your story with the world

Now that you know the difference between an autobiography vs memoir, it’s time to start the writing process. 

Regardless of which you decide to write, take some time to think back over your life, years or weeks that affected you in a particularly positive or negative way, people who influenced you, the themes you see tracing through your story, and dreams or goals you worked for. 

Once you have the big moments at the forefront of your mind you can start planning your creative autobiography or memoir ideas . If you need more inspiration on how to share your story, you can use our nonfiction book outline below.

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Home » Writing » Autobiography vs. Biography vs. Memoir

What is a Biography?

A biography, also called a bio, is a non-fiction piece of work giving an objective account of a person’s life. The main difference between a biography vs. an autobiography is that the author of a biography is not the subject. A biography could be someone still living today, or it could be the subject of a person who lived years ago.

Biographies include details of key events that shaped the subject’s life, and information about their birthplace, education, work, and relationships. Biographers use a number of research sources, including interviews, letters, diaries, photographs, essays, reference books, and newspapers. While a biography is usually in the written form, it can be produced in other formats such as music composition or film.

If the target person of the biography is not alive, then the storytelling requires an immense amount of research. Interviews might be required to collect information from historical experts, people who knew the person (e.g., friends and family), or reading other older accounts from other people who wrote about the person in previous years. In biographies where the person is still alive, the writer can conduct several interviews with the target person to gain insight on their life.

The goal of a biography is to take the reader through the life story of the person, including their childhood into adolescence and teenage years, and then their early adult life into the rest of their years. The biography tells a story of how the person learned life’s lessons and the ways the person navigated the world. It should give the reader a clear picture of the person’s personality, traits, and their interaction in the world.

Biographies can also be focused on groups of people and not just one person. For example, a biography can be a historical account of a group of people from hundreds of years ago. This group could have the main person who was a part of the group, and the author writes about the group to tell a story of how they shaped the world.

Fictional biographies mix some true historical accounts with events to help improve the story. Think of fictional biographies as movies that display a warning that the story is made of real characters, but some events are fictional to add to the storyline and entertainment value. A lot of research still goes into a fictional biography, but the author has more room to create a storyline instead of sticking to factual events.

Examples of famous biographies include:

• His Excellency: George Washington  by Joseph J. Ellis
• Einstein: The Life and Times  by Ronald William Clark
• Princess Diana – A Biography of The Princess of Wales  by Drew L. Crichton

What is an Autobiography?

An autobiography is the story of a person’s life written by that person. Because the author is also the main character of the story, autobiographies are written in the first person. Usually, an autobiography is written by the person who is the subject of the book, but sometimes the autobiography is written by another person. Because an autobiography is usually a life story for the author, the theme can be anything from religious to a personal account to pass on to children.

The purpose of an autobiography is to portray the life experiences and achievements of the author. Therefore, most autobiographies are typically written later in the subject’s life. It’s written from the point of view of the author, so it typically uses first person accounts to describe the story.

An autobiography often begins during early childhood and chronologically details key events throughout the author’s life. Autobiographies usually include information about where a person was born and brought up, their education, career, life experiences, the challenges they faced, and their key achievements.

On rare occasions, an autobiography is created from a person’s diary or memoirs. When diaries are used, the author must organize them to create a chronological and cohesive story. The story might have flashbacks or flashforwards to describe a specific event, but the main storyline should follow chronological order from the author’s early life to their current events.

One of the main differences between an autobiography vs. a biography is that autobiographies tend to be more subjective. That’s because they are written by the subject, and present the facts based on their own memories of a specific situation, which can be biased. The story covers the author’s opinions on specific subjects and provides an account of their feelings as they navigate certain situations. These stories are also very personal because it’s a personal account of the author’s life rather than a biography where a third party writes about a specific person.

Examples of famous autobiographies include:

• The Story of My Life  by Helen Keller
• The Diary of a Young Girl  by Anne Frank
• Losing My Virginity  by Richard Branson

What is a Memoir?

Memoir comes from the French word  mémoire , meaning memory or reminiscence. Similar to an autobiography, a memoir is the story of a person’s life written by that person. These life stories are often from diary entries either from a first-person account or from a close family member or friend with access to personal diaries.

The difference between a memoir vs. an autobiography is that a memoir focuses on reflection and establishing an emotional connection, rather than simply presenting the facts about their life. The author uses their personal knowledge to tell an intimate and emotional story about the private or public happenings in their life. The author could be the person in the story, or it can be written by a close family member or friend who knew the subject person intimately. The topic is intentionally focused and does not include biographical or chronological aspects of the author’s life unless they are meaningful and relevant to the story.

Memoirs come in several types, all of which are written as an emotional account of the target person. They usually tell a story of a person who went through great struggles or faced challenges in a unique way. They can also cover confessionals where the memoir tells the story of the author’s account that contradicts another’s account.

This genre of writing is often stories covering famous people’s lives, such as celebrities. In many memoir projects, the celebrity or person of interest needs help with organization, writing the story, and fleshing out ideas from the person’s diaries. It might take several interviews before the story can be fully outlined and written, so it’s not uncommon for a memoir project to last several months.

Memoirs do not usually require as much research as biographies and autobiographies, because you have the personal accounts in diary entries and documents with the person’s thoughts. It might require several interviews, however, before the diary entries can be organized to give an accurate account on the person’s thoughts and emotions. The story does not necessarily need to be in chronological order compared to an autobiography, but it might be to tell a better story.

Examples of famous memoirs include:

• Angela’s Ashes  by Frank McCourt
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings  by Maya Angelou
• Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S.  Grant by Ulysses S. Grant

Autobiography vs. Biography vs. Memoir Comparison Chart

Check out some of our blogs to learn more about memoirs:

• What is a memoir?
• 5 tips for writing a memoir
• Your memoir is your legacy

Ready to get started on your own memoir, autobiography, or biography? Download our free desktop book-making software, BookWright .

Autobiographies , Biographies , memoirs

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Shaping Your Legacy: How to Write a Compelling Autobiography

• The Speaker Lab
• March 12, 2024

Table of Contents

Ever thought about how your life story would read if it were a book? Writing an autobiography is like creating a map of your personal journey, each chapter representing milestones that shaped you. But where do you start and how can you ensure the tale holds interest?

This guide will help unravel those questions by delving into what makes an autobiography stand out, planning techniques to keep your narrative on track, writing tips for engaging storytelling, and even ethical considerations when revealing private aspects of your life.

We’ll also touch on refining drafts and navigating publishing options. By the end of this read, you’ll be equipped with all the insights you need to create a compelling autobiography!

Understanding the Essence of an Autobiography

An autobiography provides a comprehensive view of one’s life journey from birth to the present day. Imagine climbing into a time machine where every chapter represents different eras in your life. The goal of an autobiography is to allow readers to explore a factual, chronological telling of the author’s life.

Autobiographies aren’t merely catalogues of events, however; they need soulful introspection too. Think about why certain episodes mattered more than others and how those experiences influenced your perspectives or decisions later on.

You’ll also want to infuse emotional honesty, allowing yourself vulnerability when recalling both triumphant milestones and painful obstacles. Authenticity creates connections between authors and their audience, so let them see real human emotions behind every word written.

Distinguishing Features Of An Autobiography

The unique thing about autobiographies is they are first-person narratives . This allows readers to experience everything through your eyes, as if they’re living vicariously through you. From triumphs to trials, each page unravels another layer of who you are.

While memoirs are also first-person narratives of a person’s life, there are different from autobiographies. In a memoir, the author focuses on a particular time period or theme in their life. If you’d rather skip the details and dates needed for an autobiography and focus more on emotional truths, you might consider writing a memoir.

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Pre-Writing Stage: Planning Your Autobiography

The planning stage is a crucial part of writing your autobiography. It’s where you map out the significant events in your life, establish a timeline, and identify who will be reading your story.

Selecting Key Life Events

To start, you need to pinpoint key moments that have shaped you. While you will include plenty of factual details in your autobiography, you won’t include every single one. Rather, you’ll be spending the majority of your autobiography focusing on the transformative experiences that defined your life journey. After all, an autobiography is not just a catalogue of events; it’s also an exploration into what these experiences meant to you.

Establishing A Timeline

Next up is establishing a timeline for your narrative flow. Since you’re writing an autobiography, it’s important to first map out your story chronologically so that you can keep your events straight in your mind. MasterClass has several suggestions for key elements you might want to include in your timeline.

Identifying Your Audience

Finding out who’ll read your book helps shape its tone and style. Self-Publishing School says understanding whether it’s for close family members or broader public can guide how personal or universal themes should be presented.

While this process might feel overwhelming initially, take time with this stage. Good planning sets solid foundations for creating an engaging autobiography.

Writing Techniques for an Engaging Autobiography

If you’re on the journey to pen down your life story, let’s dive into some techniques that can help transform it from a simple narrative into a riveting read. An engaging autobiography is more than just facts and dates—it’s about weaving your experiences in such a way that they captivate readers.

Incorporating Dialogue

The first technique involves incorporating dialogue. Rather than telling your audience what happened, show them through conversations. It lets the reader experience events as if they were there with you. As renowned author Stephen King suggests , dialogue is crucial in defining a the character of a person (including yourself).

Using Vivid Descriptions

Vivid descriptions are another effective tool in creating an immersive reading experience. But remember: overdoing it might overwhelm or bore the reader, so find balance between being descriptive and concise.

Narrative Techniques

Different narrative techniques can also enhance storytelling in autobiographies. For instance, foreshadowing creates suspense; flashbacks provide deeper context; and stream of consciousness presents thoughts as they occur naturally—a powerful way to share personal reflections.

All these writing tools combined will give you a gripping account of your life journey—one where every turn of page reveals more layers of depth and dimensionality about who you are as both character and narrator.

Structuring Your Autobiography for Maximum Impact

Deciding on the right structure for your autobiography is essential to ensure your book captivates readers and keeps them engaged.

The first step towards structuring your autobiography effectively is deciding whether to organize it chronologically or thematically. A chronological approach takes readers on a journey through time, letting each event unfold as you experienced it. On the other hand, a thematic approach revolves around central themes that have defined your life—think resilience, ambition or transformation—and might jump back and forth in time.

Creating Chapters

An effective way to manage the vast amount of information in an autobiography is by dividing it into chapters. Each chapter should be structured around a specific time frame (if you’re opting for chronological order) or theme (if taking the thematic approach). The key here isn’t necessarily sticking rigidly to these categories but using them as guides to help shape and direct your narrative flow.

Crafting Compelling Beginnings and Endings

A strong beginning pulls people into your world while an impactful ending stays with them long after they’ve closed the book—a little like how memorable speeches often start with something surprising yet relatable and end leaving audiences pondering over what they’ve heard. So consider starting off with something unexpected that gives insight into who you are rather than birthplace/date details right away. For endings, look at wrapping up major themes from throughout the book instead of simply closing out on latest happenings in your life.

Remember, structuring an autobiography is as much about the art of storytelling as it is about chronicling facts. Use structure to draw readers in and take them on a journey through your life’s highs and lows—all the moments that made you who you are today.

Ethical Considerations When Writing an Autobiography

When penning your life story, it’s important to respect privacy and handle sensitive issues well. Because let’s face it, writing about others in our lives can be a slippery slope. We need to tread carefully.

Respecting Privacy: Telling Your Story Without Invading Others’

The first thing we have to consider is the right of privacy for those who cross paths with our narrative journey. While they might play crucial roles in our stories, remember that their experiences are their own too.

A good rule of thumb is to get explicit consent before mentioning anyone extensively or revealing sensitive information about them. In some cases where this isn’t possible, anonymizing details or using pseudonyms could help maintain privacy while keeping the essence of your story intact. Author Tracy Seeley sheds more light on how one should handle such situations responsibly.

Navigating Sensitive Topics With Care

Sensitive topics often make for compelling narratives but dealing with them requires tact and empathy. You’re walking a tightrope, balancing honesty and sensitivity, a fall from which can lead to hurt feelings or even legal troubles.

An excellent way around this dilemma would be by focusing on how these experiences affected you personally rather than detailing the event itself. Remember, your autobiography is an opportunity to share your life experiences, not just a platform for airing grievances or settling scores.

Maintaining Honesty: Your Authentic Self Is the Best Narrator

Above all else, stay truthful when writing your autobiography, both when you’re writing about sensitive topics and even when you’re not. While it can be tempting to bend the facts so that your audience sees you in a more positive light, maintaining honesty is the best thing you can do for yourself.

Editing and Revising Your Autobiography

Your initial draft is finished, but the job isn’t done yet. Editing and revising your autobiography can feel like a daunting task, but it’s essential for creating a polished final product.

The Importance of Self-Editing

You may feel that you have written your autobiography perfectly the first time, but there are always ways to make it better. The beauty of self-editing lies in refining your story to make sure it resonates with readers. You’re not just fixing typos or grammar mistakes; you’re looking at structure, flow, and consistency. Essentially you’re asking yourself: does this piece tell my life story in an engaging way?

Inviting Feedback from Others

No matter how meticulous we are as writers, our own work can sometimes evade us. Inviting feedback from others is invaluable during the revision process. They provide fresh eyes that can spot inconsistencies or confusing parts that may have slipped past us.

Hiring a Professional Editor

If you’re serious about publishing your autobiography and making an impact with your words, hiring a professional editor can be worth its weight in gold. An editor won’t just fix errors—they’ll help streamline sentences and enhance readability while respecting your unique voice.

Remember to approach editing and revising with patience—it’s part of the writing journey. Don’t rush through it; give each word careful consideration before moving onto publication options for your autobiography.

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Publishing Options for Your Autobiography

Once you’ve spent time and energy creating your autobiography, the following challenge is to make it available for others. But don’t fret! There are numerous options available for releasing your work.

Traditional Publishing Houses

A conventional path many authors take is partnering with a traditional publishing house . These industry giants have extensive resources and networks that can help boost the visibility of your book. The process may be competitive, but if accepted, they handle everything from design to distribution—letting you focus on what matters most: telling your story.

Self-Publishing Platforms

If you want more control over every aspect of publication or seek a faster route to market, self-publishing platforms like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), offer an accessible alternative. With this option, you manage all aspects including cover design and pricing ; however, it also means greater responsibility in promoting your book.

Bear in mind that both options have their own pros and cons, so consider them carefully before making any decisions.

Marketing Your Autobiography

Now that you’ve crafted your autobiography, it’s time to get the word out. You need a plan and strategy.

Leveraging Social Media

To start with, use your social platforms as launching pads for your book. Sites like Facebook , Twitter, and especially LinkedIn can help generate buzz about your work. And don’t underestimate the power of other platforms like Instagram and TikTok when trying to reach younger audiences. Whatever social platform you use, remember to engage with followers by responding to comments and questions about the book.

Organizing Book Signings

A physical event like a book signing not only provides readers with a personal connection but also generates local publicity. Consider partnering up with local independent stores or libraries, which are often open to hosting such events.

Securing Media Coverage

Contacting local newspapers, radio stations or even bloggers and podcasters in your field can provide much-needed visibility for your work. It might seem intimidating at first, but who better than you knows how important this story is?

FAQs on How to Write an Autobiography

How do i start an autobiography about myself.

To kick off your autobiography, jot down significant life events and pick a unique angle that frames your story differently.

What are the 7 steps in writing an autobiography?

The seven steps are: understanding what an autobiography is, planning it out, using engaging writing techniques, structuring it effectively, considering ethics, revising thoroughly, and exploring publishing options.

What are the 3 parts of an autobiography?

An autobiography generally has three parts: introduction (your background), body (major life events), and conclusion (reflections on your journey).

What is the format for writing an autobiography?

The usual format for autobiographies involves chronological or thematic structure with clear chapters marking distinct phases of life.

Writing an autobiography is a journey, a trek exploring the unique narrative of your life. Together, we’ve covered how to plan effectively, select key events, and set timelines.

Once you’re all set to write, you now have the techniques you need for engaging storytelling, including vivid descriptions and dialogues. You also learned about structuring your story for maximum impact and navigating sensitive topics while maintaining honesty.

Last but not least, you learned editing strategies, publishing options, and effective ways of promoting your book.

Now you know more than just how to write an autobiography. You know how to craft a legacy worth reading!

• Last Updated: March 22, 2024

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autobiography

What is autobiography definition, usage, and literary examples, autobiography definition.

An  autobiography  (awe-tow-bye-AWE-gruh-fee) is a self-written  biography . The author writes about all or a portion of their own life to share their experience, frame it in a larger cultural or historical context, and/or inform and entertain the reader.

Autobiographies have been a popular literary genre for centuries. The first Western autobiography is attributed to Saint Augustine of Hippo for his 13-book work titled  Confessions , written between 397 and 400 CE. Some autobiographies are a straightforward narrative that recollects a linear chain of events as they unfolded. The genre has expanded and evolved to include different approaches to the form.

The word  autobiography  comes from the Ancient Greek  auto  (“self”) +  bios  (“life”) +  graphein  (“to write”) = “a self-written life.” It is also known as autography .

The History of Autobiography

Scholars regard Augustine’s  Confessions  as the first Western autobiography. Other autobiographical works from antiquity include Jewish historian Flavius Josephus’s  Vita  (circa 99 CE) and Greek scholar Libanius’s  Oration I  (374 CE). Works of this kind were called apologias, which essentially means “in my defense.” Writers approached these works not as acts of self-documentation but as self-defense. They represented a way to explain and provide rationale for their life, work, and escapades. There was also less focus on their emotional lives.

The Book of Margery Kempe , written in 1438 by an English Christian mystic, is the earliest known autobiography in English. (Though it didn’t see full publication until the 20th century.) Other early English-language biographies of note include:

• Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s 1764 memoirs
• John Bunyan’s  Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners  in 1666
• Jarena Lee’s  The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee  (the first autobiography of an African American woman)

Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s  Confessions was published in 1782. It paved the way for the more thoughtful, emotionally centered autobiographies seen today. Autobiography as a literary genre emerged a few years later, when British scholar William Taylor first used the term to describe a self-written biography. He did so disparagingly, suggesting the form was  pedantic . In 1809, English Romantic poet Robert Southey used the term more seriously to describe self-written biographies.

Starting in the 20th century, more young people started writing autobiographies. Perhaps the most famous example is Anne Frank’s  The Diary of a Young Girl , about her time hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic. The 21st century saw an increase in autobiographical essay collections and memoirs by younger celebrities, including:

• Anna Kendrick
• Mindy Kaling
• Gabourey Sidibe
• Mike Birbiglia
• Lena Dunham
• Chelsea Handler

Autobiographies are not immune to controversy. One notable scandal involved author James Frey’s  A Million Little Pieces . Originally billed as a memoir, evidence later emerged that Frey invented key parts of the story. This example underscores how easily authors can cross over into autofiction—fictional autobiography—and how seriously readers take authors’ responsibility to accurately and honestly market their books.

Types of Autobiographies

There are a few different types of self-written works that qualify as autobiography.

Standard Autobiographies

In the most traditional form, authors recount their life or specific formative events from their life. This approach often utilizes a chronological format of events, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. An author’s approach might include a framing device such as flashbacks, in which they move from the present to the past as they remember their lives. For example, Broadway star Patti LuPone’s self-titled autobiography begins on the opening night of  Gypsy  in 2004 before moving back in time to LuPone’s childhood. An author could take a more stream-of-consciousness style, in which one memory links to another by a common theme. Irish writer Seán O’Casey narrates his six-volume  Autobiographies  in this manner

This is a type of autobiography that is narrower in scope and focus. It places greater emphasis on particular memories, thoughts, and feelings. A standard autobiography can certainly cover some of this same ground—most do—but the memoir is more interested in individual events or defined portions of the author’s life and the emotions and lessons behind them.

Henry David Thoreau is a notable memoirist. In Walden , he reflects on his time spent living in solitude in the woods of Massachusetts and what he learned about life and nature throughout this experience. Another example is  The Year of Magical Thinking  by Joan Didion, which relates the death of her husband and its impact on her life and work. Another is  Wild  by Cheryl Strayed, wherein Strayed remembers her time hiking the Pacific Crest Trail during a period of great change in her life.

Autofiction

The fictionalized autobiography, or autofiction, is another type of autobiography. The author presents their story not as fact but as fiction. This method gives them considerable space to take creative license with events and characters, thereby blurring the lines between reality and fiction. The overall goal is less about the author wanting to obscure facts and make things up and more a matter of taking another tactic to delve into their experiences in service of self-discovery.  Taipei  by Tao Lin is a work of autofiction. The central character, Paul, mirrors Lin’s own life and experiences, from the literary world of New York City to his ancestral roots in Taiwan.

Spiritual Autobiographies

These autobiographies center on the author’s religious or spiritual awakening and the subsequent journey their faith has taken them on. Common elements include struggles and doubt, a life-altering conversion, periods of regression, and sharing the “message.” These all act as endorsements of the author’s faith. Augustine’s  Confessions , Paramahansa Yogananda’s  Autobiography of a Yogi , and Augusten Burroughs’s  Toil & Trouble: A Memoir  are all spiritual autobiographies.

Autobiography vs. Biography

Both autobiographies and  biographies  are records of real lives, but there is one major distinction. A person other than the book’s subject writes a biography, while the subject themselves writes an autobiography. In this way, an autobiography is essentially a biography of the self. The biographer’s job is typically more involved, entailing detailed research into the life of the subject. The autobiographer, however, is usually not burdened by this because they lived through the events they write about. They may need only to confirm dates and stories to accurately relate the pertinent details.

The Function of Autobiography

An autobiography allows the author to tell the true story of their own life. This is the reason why autobiographies have always been written by famous people. History tends to remember notable individuals for just one significant contribution or event and, even then, the public’s perception of it may be inaccurate. Writing an autobiography allows the author to share the real story and put it into the larger context of their life and times.

Most readers pick up an autobiography expecting some degree of subjectivity from the author. After all, the events chronicled happened to the author, so the writing will of course have a biased  perspective . There are advantages to this subjectivity, though. The reader gets the real story directly from the person who lived it, unvarnished by others’ opinions or erroneous historical data.

One way this subjectivity is problematic is that the author may not possess the ability to see the story they’re telling from other perspectives. For example, they may not acknowledge any hurt they caused others, dangerous behaviors they engaged in, or the “other side” of a controversial event in which there are equally valid opposing viewpoints and experiences. Any of these deficiencies can result in a somewhat skewed narrative.

Writers Known for Autobiography & Autobiography Books

• Maya Angelou,  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ,  Gather Together in My Name
• Jung Chang,  Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
• Isak Dinesen,  Out of Africa ,  Shadows on the Grass
• Carrie Fisher,  Wishful Drinking ,  Shockaholic
• Anne Frank,  The Diary of a Young Girl
• Ernest Hemingway,  A Moveable Feast
• Karl Ove Knausgård,  My Struggle
• Frank McCourt,  Angela’s Ashes
• Anaïs Nin,  The Diaries of Anaïs Nin
• Marcel Proust,  Remembrance of Things Past
• Patti Smith,  Just Kids ,  M Train
• Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain
• Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
• Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
• Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography
• Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
• Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi: An Autobiography 

Examples of Autobiographies

1. Maya Angelou,  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Angelou’s autobiography is the first installment in a seven-volume series chronicling the life of the legendary poet, teacher, actress, director, dancer, and civil rights activist. Given all those roles, it’s easy to see why Angelou’s life story makes for interesting reading.

This volume centers primarily on her early life in Stamps, Arkansas, and the devastating effects of a childhood rape. It also explores racism in the American South. It discuses the important role reading plays in helping young Maya deal with the sexual assault and pervasive prejudice in her environment.

2. Helen Keller,  The Story of My Life

Keller’s autobiography details her first 20 years, starting with the childhood illness that caused her blindness and deafness. She discusses the obstacles she had to overcome and the life-changing relationship she shared with her teacher, Anne Sullivan, who helped her learn to read and write. Keller also documents her friendships with several famous figures of her day, including Alexander Graham Bell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and First Lady Frances Cleveland.

3. Vinh Chung,  Where the Wind Leads

Chung’s autobiography recalls the harrowing story of a Vietnamese refugee and his journey to make the American Dream his own. Born in South Vietnam, Chung comes of age in a changing political climate that eventually compels his family to flee the country. Their voyage takes them through the South China Sea, run-ins with pirates, resettlement in Arkansas, and Chung’s graduation from Harvard Medical School.

How to Write an Autobiography

Autobiography is a truly universal art form and is accessible to anyone, whether you're in high school or 100 years old. Exploring the process of writing an autobiography deserves an article in itself, but the process should include these steps:

• Determine your "why." What lessons do you want to impart via your story, and why are they worth sharing with a broader audience?
• Draft an autobiographical outline. It should include information about your upbringing, impactful moments throughout your life, stories of failure and success, and meaningful mentors.
• Begin with the easiest sections. Getting started is often the greatest hurdle, so begin by writing the chapters that feel most accessible or enjoyable.
• Write your first draft. Once you write the first chapters, it will feel easier to write the rest. Capitalize on your momentum and write a full draft.
• Step away. As with anything, stepping away from your work will help foster fresh perspectives when you return.
• Edit and re-write your draft. Your first draft will probably benefit from thorough revisions, as will your second draft, and maybe your third. Continue to edit and revise until it feels right.
• Ask for help. Bring in a trusted family member or friend or professional editor to help with final edits.

Further Resources on Autobiography

ThoughtCo. shares some  important points to consider before writing an autobiography .

The Living Handbook of Narratology delves into the  history of the autobiography .

MasterClass breaks autobiography writing down into  eight basic steps .

Pen & the Pad looks at the  advantages and disadvantages of the autobiography .

Lifehack has a list of  15 autobiographies everyone should read at least once .

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Life writing.

• Craig Howes Craig Howes Department of English and Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1146
• Published online: 27 October 2020

Since 1990, “life writing” has become a frequently used covering term for the familiar genres of biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, letters, and many other forms of life narrative. Initially adopted as a critical intervention informed by post-structuralist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and especially feminist theory of the 1970s and 1980s, the term also refers to the study of life representation beyond the traditional literary and historical focus on verbal texts, encompassing not only other media—film, graphic narratives, online technologies, performance—but also research in other disciplines—psychology, anthropology, ethnic and Indigenous studies, political science, sociology, education, medicine, and any other field that records, observes, or evaluates lives.

While many critics and theorists still place their work within the realms of autobiography or biography, and others find life writing as a discipline either too ideologically driven, or still too confining conceptually, there is no question that life representation, primarily through narrative, is an important consideration for scholars engaged in virtually any field dealing with the nature and actions of human beings, or anything that lives.

• autobiography
• autofiction
• life narrative

As Julie Rak noted in 2018 , Marlene Kadar’s essay “Coming to Terms: Life Writing—from Genre to Critical Practice,” although written in 1992 , still offers a useful account of life writing’s history as a term, and is still a timely reminder to examine constantly the often-buried theoretical assumptions defining and confining it. After noting that because “life writing” was in use before “biography” or “autobiography,” it “has always been the more inclusive term,” Kadar supplies a taxonomy in the form of a progressive history. Until the 1970s, “life writing” referred to “a particular branch of textual criticism” that subjected some biographies and autobiographies, and a scattering of letters and diaries, to the same literary-critical scrutiny commonly focused upon poetry, drama, or fiction. Kadar cites Donald J. Winslow’s Life-Writing as a locus for this understanding. 1 The problem lurking here is what Kadar elsewhere refers to as “the New Critical wolf”: theoretical assumptions that are “androcentric” and privilege notions of “objective truth and narrative regularity.” Clearly wanting to label this as residual, she turns to the then-current “more broadened version” of life writing. Its champions are primarily, though not exclusively, feminist literary critics devoted to “the proliferation, authorization, and recuperation” of autobiographical texts written by “literary,” but also “ordinary,” men and women. While the “ordinary” allows “personal narratives, oral narratives and life testimonies” and even “anthropological life histories” to enter the realm of life writing, this now-dominant understanding is nevertheless problematic, because it still tends to uncritically draw such binary distinctions as fiction/autobiography, literary/non-literary non-fiction, and even male/female. Heavily influenced by postmoderism, Kadar proposes a third, emergent vision of life writing that moves beyond a desire for fixity and canonization—“with laws and law-making”—by embracing a dynamic, constantly questioning methodology: “From Genre to Critical Practice.” 2

This approach gestures toward a focus upon intersectionality in “unofficial” writing—Kadar’s example is Frederick Douglass—and toward an expansive yet politically engaged life-writing practice that can “appreciate the canon, revise it where it sees fit, and forget it where it also sees fit.” 3 The same approach should be adopted toward such terms as “the autobiographical” or “life writing itself.” After describing life writing “as a continuum that spreads unevenly and in combined forms from the so-called least fictive narration to the most fictive,” she offers her own “working definition.” Life-writing texts “are written by an author who does not continuously write about someone else”—note how biography has at best been relegated to the fringes of the realm—and “who also does not pretend to be absent from the [black, brown, or white] text himself/herself.” Neither an archive nor a taxonomy of texts, life writing employs “an imperfect and always evolving hermeneutic,” where “classical, traditional, or postmodern” approaches coexist, rather than always being set against each other. 4

Kadar’s early-1990s assessment and prophecy will serve here as loose organizational principles for describing how the move “from Genre to Critical Practice” in the ensuing years has proved to be an astonishing, though contested, unfolding of life writing as a term encompassing more initiatives by diverse communities in many locations and media that even the far-sighted Marlene Kadar could have anticipated. Even so, her insistence that life-writing critics and theorists must continue to “resist and reverse the literary and political consequences” produced by impulses toward “ʻdepersonalization’ and unrelenting ʻabstraction’” still stands. 5

From Biography to Autobiography to Life Writing

Kadar’s support for life writing as the umbrella term came in the wake of an energetic focus on autobiography as the most critically and theoretically stimulating life-narrative genre. The academic journal Biography had begun appearing in 1978 , but for all its claims to be An Interdisciplinary Quarterly , it was assumed to be largely devoted to traditional biography criticism and theory. In 1980 , James Olney noted the “shift of attention from bios to autos —from the life to the self,” which he credited with “opening things up and turning them in a philosophical, psychological and literary direction.” 6 Biography scholars would have begged to differ. Discussions of psychology, with an emphasis on psychoanalysis, and of the aesthetics of literary biography, with special attention paid to affinities with the novel, had been part of biography’s critical and theoretical environment for a century. 7 Olney however was not just arguing for autobiography’s legitimacy, but for the primacy of autos within literature itself—a key claim of his landmark monograph Metaphors of Self . 8 Olney was a convener as well as a critic and theorist. Ricia Chansky identifies the “International Symposium on Autobiography and Autobiography Studies” Olney held in 1985 as “the moment when contemporary auto/biography studies emerged as a formal discipline within the academy”—not least because it led to the creation of a newsletter that soon became the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies . Although the slashes in the title—credited to Timothy Dow Adams—suggested that a/b would not privilege “self-life writing over life writing,” the variety and sheer number of critical and theoretical works devoted to autobiography in the ensuing years made it clear that for many, it was the more interesting genre. 9

Institutionalization and professional assertion soon followed. Sidonie Smith recalls “those heady days” of creating archives and bibliographies, but also of “writing against the grain, writing counterhistories, writing beyond conventional plots and tropes.” 10 As Olney had predicted, autobiography became a flash point for critical and theoretical writing in women’s studies—a trend heavily influencing Kadar’s thoughts on life writing, and canonized in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader , whose introduction is still the most detailed account of how women critics and theorists from the 1970s to the late 1990s drew upon the most compelling feminist, post-structuralist, cultural, and political writing in their encounters with autobiographical texts. 11

This interest in autobiography—with or without the slash—produced an entire generation of influential writers. Because of their general eminence, Paul de Man’s and Roland Barthes’s comments on and experiments with autobiography were closely examined, but other theorists made autobiography their central attention. 12 Philippe Lejeune’s profoundly influential essay “The Autobiographical Pact” complemented Olney’s book on metaphors of self, and so did Paul John Eakin’s volumes Fictions of Autobiography and Touching the World as arguments for the genre’s legitimacy within literary studies. 13 A host of important books, collections, and anthologies soon followed, many with a strongly feminist approach. Sidonie Smith’s A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography was an important intervention into literary aesthetics, and Smith and Watson’s edited collection De/Colonizing the Subject forged important links between autobiography and feminist and postcolonial theory. 14 Many other feminist critics and theorists in Europe and North America in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s directed their attention as writers and editors to autobiography, among them collection editors Shari Benstock and Bella Brodsky and Celeste Schenk; monograph writers Elizabeth Bruss, Leigh Gilmore, Caroline Heilbrun, Françoise Lionnet, Nancy K. Miller, and Liz Stanley; and essayists Susan Stanford Friedman and Mary G. Mason. Following in the tradition of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own , other feminist literary and cultural historians sought out forgotten or yet-to-be-discovered women autobiographers—Patricia Meyer Spacks for the 18th century ; Mary Jean Corbett, Regenia Gagnier, Linda H. Peterson, and Valerie Sanders for the long 19th century ; Estelle C. Jelinek from the time of antiquity; and collection editor Domna C. Stanton from the medieval period to the 20th century . 15

Often viewed through the lens of literary and cultural theory, autobiography therefore became the most-discussed life-writing genre in the 1980s, and has largely remained so ever since. But from the time of Kadar’s Essays on Life Writing , the term “life writing” became increasingly employed as the umbrella term for representing the lives of others, or of one’s self. The key intervention here was Margaretta Jolly’s landmark two-volume Encyclopedia of Life Writing . Published in 2001 , the title term encompasses Autobiographical and Biographical Forms , and through her contributors, Jolly accounts in 1,090 large double-column pages not just for the genres that could be considered life writing, but for life-writing practices in a host of world regions and historical periods. She emphasizes her subject’s interdisciplinary nature. Although the “writing of lives is an ancient and ubiquitous practice,” and the term “life writing” can in England be traced back to the late 17th or early 18th century , it has only gained “wide academic acceptance since the 1980s.” While noting that “the study of autobiography is the most-long-standing and sophisticated branch of analysis in the field”—a claim that biography scholars would dispute, at least with regard to duration—Jolly grants Kadar’s wish to expand beyond the literary by including entries grounded in “anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, theology, cultural studies, and even the biological sciences,” and in forms of life narrative “outside of the written form, including testimony, artifacts, reminiscence, personal narrative, visual arts, photography, film, oral history, and so forth.” 16

The Encyclopedia also provides “international and historical perspective through accounts of life writing traditions and trends from around the world, from Classical times to the present,” and covers “popular and everyday genres and contexts—from celebrity and royal biography to working-class autobiography, letter writing, interviews, and gossip”—a continuation of work, epitomized by Smith and Watson’s Getting a Life , that pays close attention to how “ordinary” lives are produced in a variety of public and institutional settings. 17 Like Kadar, Jolly notes the “crucial influence” of “Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, African-American, and Post-Colonial Studies” upon autobiography studies’ emergence in the 1980s, and she also observes that many contributors use the term “auto/biography” to point toward a more capacious sense of the field. But also like Kadar, in an “effort to balance the emphasis on autobiography,” Jolly chooses “life writing” as her preferred term, because it can more easily accommodate “many aspects of this wide-ranging field, not to mention regions of the world, where life-writing scholarship remains in its infancy, or has yet to emerge.” 18 This ambitious and expansive reference work anticipates most of the ensuing developments in life writing.

In the same year appeared the first edition of Smith and Watson’s Reading Autobiography . Although retaining autobiography as the covering term—describing it as “a particular generic practice” that “became definitive for life writing in the West”—they share Jolly’s commitment to generic, historic, and geographical inclusivity, and take a highly detailed approach to clarifying terminology. 19 Echoing Kadar, they note that autobiography “has been vigorously challenged in the wake of postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the Enlightenment subject”—an entity whose “politics is one of exclusion.” In response, they grant that “life writing” is a more expansive term, because it can refer to “writing that takes a life, one’s own or another’s, as its subject,” whether “biographical, novelistic, historical, or explicitly self-referential.” But, always sensitive to new developments and dimensions, Smith and Watson suggest that “life narrative” is even more capacious, because it refers to “autobiographical [and presumably biographical] acts of any sort.” 20 With the added perspective of nine years, and then eighteen years for their second edition, Smith and Watson update Kadar’s 1992 account of the profound impact that feminist, postmodernist, and postcolonial theory have had upon life writing—although they still direct readers to their own Women, Autobiography, Theory for a more detailed “overview of representative theories and work up to the late 1990s.” 21 Their main point is that the theoretical work Kadar called for has been taking place: “the challenges posed by postmodernism’s deconstruction of any solid ground of selfhood and truth outside of discourse,” when coupled with “postcolonial theory’s troubling of established hierarchies of authority, tradition, and influence,” led life-writing critics and theorists to examine “generic instability, regimes of truth telling, referentiality, relationality, and embodiment,” which not only undermined “the earlier critical period’s understanding of canonical autobiography” but also “expanded the range of life writing and the kinds of stories critics may engage in rethinking the field of life narrative.” 22

An efficient two-page synopsis identifies the specific theoretical stimuli for this critical scrutiny. Lacanian psychoanalysis undercut the notion of the autonomous self, replacing it with a “split subject always constituted in language.” Derridean différance offers the insight that in life writing, as in all writing, “meaning is always in process, continuously put off, or deferred.” With Jean François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida also deconstructs the supposed boundaries between Truth and fiction, actually set by supposed “ʻmaster’” narratives. Louis Althusser’s linking of socioeconomic relations to subjectivity offers life-writing scholars interpolation as a concept for understanding life-narrative construction. Michel Foucault’s claim that discourse is an exercise of power tied to the construction of identity is also formative, and so is Bakhtinian heteroglossia as the counter to the fantasy of the unitary “I.” Feminist theory directs life-writing scholars’ attention to the relationship between the political and the personal, to the “cultural inscription and practices of embodiment,” and to the dangers inherent in universalized notions of “woman.” Frantz Fanon’s work on the colonial gaze foregrounds domination’s and subordination’s roles in the constitution of subjectivity, which postcolonial, ethnic, and feminist theorists all see as crucial for recognizing the minoritizing of subjectivity, and then decolonizing such constructions. Gay and queer studies reveal the performative nature of subjectivity, and undermine binary models of gender and sexuality. Cultural studies’ interest in “popular, public, and everyday forms of textuality, including everyday practices of self-narrating in verbal, visual, and mixed modes,” extends the range of life narratives that can be examined, and neurological studies offer insight into the brain’s material effects on memory, and into trauma’s impact on perceived identity. 23

In “Expanding Autobiography Studies,” the final chapter of their two-part critical history of the field, Smith and Watson list the important critical and theoretical initiatives of previous decades. Performativity, positionality, and relationality are presented as “Useful Theoretical Concepts.” Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter and Smith’s own Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body are cited as formative texts for recognizing that the self customarily thought of as “prior to the autobiographical expression or reflection is an effect of autobiographical storytelling.” 24 Paul John Eakin and Nancy K. Miller are credited with expanding the applicability of relationality beyond feminist theory and women’s autobiography and arriving at a virtually universal applicability for life writing. 25 The most important concept for contemporary life writing, however, is arguably positionality, because it helps critics and theorists evaluate how “culturally salient” subject positions, “always multiple and often contradictory,” find ways to tell their stories “at a particular historical moment.” Formed “at the intersections of multiple discursive trajectories,” certain life narratives insist on the significance of subjects who are dealing with “de/colonization, immigration, displacement, and exile.” Such narratives demand the critical use of such terms as “ hybrid, border, diasporic, mestiza, nomadic, migratory, minoritized ”; they also force theorists to consider the natures and purposes of Indigenous life writing. 26

Despite this emphasis on life writing as referential, registering changes in practice still tends to involve identifying and tracking what Smith and Watson call “Emergent Genres of Life Narrative.” 27 Their second edition ( 2010 ) foregrounds trauma narratives, disability life writing, and human rights narratives and testimonio ; life writing appearing from a much wider range of locations, organized under the title “Critical Geographies”; narratives that foreground developments in neuroscience, memory, and genetics; the myriad of life representations arising out of the turbulent realm of “Digitalized Forms and Identities”; the templates or familiar genres deployed for recording “Everyday Lives”; and, more generally, autocritical scholarship, which requires critics or theorists to position themselves in relation to the narratives they choose to record or study and, in some cases, to recognize the necessity of being a part or a member of the group or population whose life stories are at issue.

Smith and Watson end their anatomy and history of autobiography by noting that the many “contesting approaches” to life writing are also adding many formerly “marginal” forms to “the canon of autobiography.” In the 2010 edition, Appendix A offers definitions for “Sixty Genres of Life Narrative,” up from the fifty-two provided in the first edition. But Smith and Watson “conclude” that increases in the number of relevant texts and presenting media will lead to major shifts in critical and theoretical debates, even though at bottom, a life narrative is always “a rhetorical act embedded in the history of specific communities.” 28

Backlash, Boomlash, and Boom Echo

Raymond Williams and Marlene Kadar would both acknowledge that treating ideologies or forms of life writing as residual, dominant, or emergent, and therefore capable of being mapped onto a historical or progressive continuum, can neither assume the disappearance of earlier stages, nor prevent resurgences and unpredictable alliances. 29 Take for example the history of critical debates since the late 20th century about the relationship between biography and life writing. The focus on autobiography as the central concern for critics has often been explicit: Marlene Kadar’s 1992 provisional definition of life writing ruled out authors who “continuously write about someone else.” 30 In response, many biographers and some theorists have insisted on biography’s continuing significance, and even centrality. Everyone involved tends to agree that biography was once dominant, but is now either residual, or treated as such. But in the 21st century highly unlikely allies have been calling for a “Biographical Turn,” which for some means re-evaluating what it means to tell another’s life in different historical and cultural contexts, and for others actually means a “Return” to pre-eminence—emergent and residual, yet united in asserting biography’s value. 31

Insisting that biography’s strongest affinities lie with history, and not literature or cultural studies, Hans Renders has arguably been the most visible defender of biography against the onslaught of life writing, which he considers a “shift” into an “ideology” emerging from “comparative literature and gender and cultural studies.” According to Renders, life-writing critics and theorists present autobiographers, and sometimes themselves, as “victimized by social context” and therefore, in Michael Holroyd’s words, seeking “retrospective justice.” 32 The biographer or biography theorist respects the “scholarly imperative to analyze the world (including the past) as objectively as possible”—not “to correct injustice,” but to “understand it better.” Conversely, those who study life writing seem preoccupied with “battered and raped women,” “Mothering Narratives,” “ʻJewish Women and Comics,’” “homosexuals,” and self-proclaimed victims of “climate change” or “racism, and social exclusion.” 33 The emphasis on gender here can be read as a response to the profound impact of feminist theory on autobiography and life-writing studies, and the gestures to race and class as resistance to the tenor of emergent life-narrative scholarship.

What must also be accounted for is the sustained production of biography by trade and university publishers. Throughout the memoir boom that so many theorists, critics, and reviewers have declared, highly conventional single-volume biographies have appeared regularly, speaking to the continued public interest in what Hans Renders calls “the biographical tradition, based on individuals like Hitler or Einstein, but also less famous persons.” 34 The indisputable success of The Biographer’s Craft newsletter ( 2008 –) and the creation of the Biographers International Organization (BIO; 2010 –), with its hugely popular annual conferences, counter biography’s residual status in much life-writing criticism and theory with its continued prominence in the public sphere. And arguably, most BIO members prefer it that way. Like many poets, playwrights, and novelists, biographers are often wary of critics and theorists of literature, preferring at their conferences to discuss publishing possibilities, or to receive advice on research and writing, rather than engage in theoretical or critical analysis of biography as a genre. 35

But of course, life-writing scholars are also interested in production, with Julie Rak as the most prominent cultural historian and theorist who insists that publication and distribution are salient, and even essential, subjects of study. Although primarily concerned with autobiography, her 2013 book Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market focuses on books “written, published, sold in bookstores and circulated by public libraries for people like my grandmother.” Rak presents non-fiction “as part of a production cycle” of “commodities that are manufactured for a market by an industry,” paying close attention to the mechanics of publication, distribution, classification for purposes of sales, and advertising for books “produced by mainstream presses for large audiences”—a critical interest that she paved the way for by editing a special issue on popular auto/biography for the Canadian Review of American Studies . 36 The affordances and filters that particular models of production impose upon life narratives are technological correlatives to the ideologically informed reception that certain kinds of life writing and testimony encounter when they venture into the world. Most notably, in Tainted Witness , Leigh Gilmore evaluates how women’s life narratives arouse powerful, at times hysterical, and even violent constraints upon what they are allowed to say about life conditions, or about the actions of others—and especially powerful men. 37 Though genres and chosen media may range from published memoirs or testimonio , to congressional hearings, to court trials, to social media venues and campaigns, the dynamics are the same. Women’s life-writing narratives threaten to disrupt or damage a man’s supposed life script by adding to it details of abuse, or cruelty, or criminality. It would be hard to imagine a more vivid example of what Hans Renders objects to in life writing, but the social and political significance of such narratives also explains why they could never easily be relegated to a marginal subgenre of biography. In fact, the power dynamics in Renders’s paradigm between male-centered “objective” biography and female-produced “victim” life writing mirror those in the scenarios that Gilmore evaluates.

The rest of this article maps out the most notable developments in life-narrative scholarship since the late 20th century , drawing principally on the “Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing,” an annotated list of books, edited collections and special issues, individual articles, and dissertations that appears in Biography : An Interdisciplinary Quarterly . The sample contains roughly 21,000 entries; the discussion here will concentrate on books, edited collections, and special issues because they represent formidable and sustained studies of some aspect of the field, or point to a community of scholars engaged in similar work. While essentially tracing out Kadar’s three-stage progressive account of life writing, this article will also provide examples of critical and theoretical practice to elaborate on the expansions, revisions, departures, and interventions that the practice of life-writing and life-narrative scholarship has produced. The discussion concludes by identifying a few ideas that might offer new directions or understandings for those interested in how lives are represented.

Biography Studies Sustained—Residual as Dominant and Emergent

For a genre supposedly lapsing into subordinate status or irrelevance, biography continues to attract a great deal of critical and theoretical attention. Though usually retracing that familiar Western trajectory running from Rome through to contemporary trade publications, historical or thematic overviews, often written by well-known biographers, appear regularly. Some are reader-friendly primers, such as Nigel Hamilton’s Brief History , Hermione Lee’s Very Short Introduction , and Andrew Brown’s Brief History of Biography: From Plutarch to Celebs , all of which appeared in the early 21st century . More “weighty” accounts include Catherine N. Parke’s Biography: Writing Lives and Paula R. Backscheider’s Reflections , both published in the 1990s. 38 Before any of these histories, however, came Carl Rollyson’s Biography: An Annotated Bibliography ( 1992 ), which organized and annotated the critical literature in English. Arguably the most prolific writer on biography theory and criticism, Rollyson has published many biographies—political, literary, and cinematic—and several guides and essay collections about theory and practice. 39 Biography: A User’s Guide , for instance, discusses keywords alphabetically; Hans Renders and Nigel Hamilton adopt a similar format for The ABC of Modern Biography . 40 A popular sub-genre comprises books for would-be biographers written by famous practitioners. Extending back to Leon Edel, more recent examples include Michael Holroyd’s Works on Paper , Carl Rollyson’s Confessions of a Serial Biographer , and Nigel Hamilton’s How to Do Biography —a companion volume to his Brief History . 41

Literary lives appear prominently in all of these works, and many texts take them as their subject. John Batchelor’s The Art of Literary Biography and Warwick Gould and Thomas F. Staley’s Writing the Lives of Writers are edited collections arising out of conferences in the 1990s; more recently, Robert Dion and Frédéric Regard have edited Les nouvelles écritures biographiques , and Richard Bradford has overseen a substantial Companion to Literary Biography . 42 Individual monographs include Michael Benton’s Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography , and Rana Tekcan’s Too Far for Comfort . And even though she has reservations about focusing on female writers, Alison Booth’s How to Make It as a Woman is a detailed and insightful study of literary biography in the 19th and 20th centuries . 43

Despite literary biography’s apparently privileged status, historians have also explored biography’s significance to their field. Barbara Caine’s Biography and History was followed by two edited collections from the Netherlands: Hans Renders and Binne de Haan’s Theoretical Discussions of Biography ; and Renders, de Haan, and Jonne Harmsma’s The Biographical Turn . Both volumes argue for biography as a historical genre that does not share life writing’s preoccupations with race, class, and gender. That the distinction is significant is also suggested by the title of Tanya Evans and Robert Reynolds’s “Introduction to this Special Issue on Biography and Life-Writing” for disclosure . 44 German historians have also displayed a strong interest in biography, in edited clusters such as Atiba Pertilla’s and Uwe Spiekermann’s “The Challenge of Biography,” or Sarah Panter’s Mobility and Biography . 45

Monographs and collections have delineated specific periods and locations for study. Thomas Hägg’s The Art of Biography in Antiquity has some affinities with the Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography , edited by Stephanos Efthymiadis; with Sharpe and Zwicker’s edited collection on early modern England; and with Mombert and Rosellini’s edited volume Usages des vies . Juliette Atkinson’s Victorian Biography Reconsidered is an astute and suggestive study of England’s intense preoccupation with various forms of the genre. 46 And while such works tend to confine themselves to Western Europe—Great Britain, France, and Germany/Austria—or the United States, collections have focused on other regions, among them Eastern Europe and the Nordic countries. 47

Despite the longstanding suspicion of considering biography through the lens of contemporary theory, a substantial number of such works have appeared since c. 2005 , many from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna. Wilhelm Hemecker, its director, has edited or co-edited several volumes; among them is the remarkable Theorie der Biographie , co-edited with Bernhard Fetz, which contains excerpts from famous authors and theorists with special relevance for biography—Samuel Johnson, Thomas Carlyle, William Dilthey, Sigfried Kracauer, Michel Foucault, the Vienna psychoanalysts—paired with commentaries by contemporary biography scholars. Fetz also edited Die Biographie—Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie , which appeared in 2009 . 48 More than a decade earlier, a similar overview was provided by Biographical Creation / La création biographique , an English/French volume edited by Marta Dvorak. 49 Monographs taking a sustained theoretical approach to biography are relatively rare. Two of the most notable are Susan Tridgell’s Understanding Our Selves and Caitríona Ní Dhúill’s Metabiography , an impressive overview by a scholar formerly at the Boltzmann Institute. 50

The subtitle of the journal Biography promises interdisciplinary scholarship. Thanks largely to Freud, psychoanalytic and psychological approaches to life narrative have appeared for over a century, with psychobiography emerging as a clearly delineated discipline. Alan C. Elms’s Uncovering Lives led the way, with William Todd Schultz’s Handbook of Psychobiography offering a synthesis of scholarly activity by such researchers as psychologist Dan P. McAdams, author of The Redemptive Self and many other studies of personality. 51 Other social sciences at times have taken their own biographical turn, among them both archaeology and anthropology. 52

Indigenous studies scholarship represents a significant emerging engagement. A special issue of Biography entitled “Indigenous Conversations about Biography” explores the genre’s value and dangers for researchers recovering or creating archives, histories, and life records. In The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen , Noenoe K. Silva refers to her method of establishing critical and publishing genealogies for Hawaiians writing in Hawaiian in the 19th and early 20th centuries as bio-bibliography. Fine arts scholars are also assessing what biography contributes to their disciplines. Melanie Unseld’s Biographie und Musikgeschichte examines the genre’s usefulness for those interested in musical culture and historiography, and a Biography special issue entitled “Verse Biography” should not be immediately conflated with literary biography. Though the lives discussed are in verse, the subjects are not necessarily writers. 53

In their introduction to “Indigenous Conversations about Biography,” Alice Te Punga Somerville and Daniel Heath Justice note that even though the term “life writing” is common in academic circles, and even though the plan for the seminar for contributors held in Honolulu was to “unpack, repack, and throw out terms once we’re at the table,” they chose to stay with biography because it “is well-known in Indigenous circles,” concluding that “there is still life in this old term ʻbiography’ yet.” 54 The same can be said for the publishing world; in fact, “biographies” are regularly appearing for non-human subjects. Noted biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd published London: The Biography in 2000 ; the “concise” version followed in 2012 . In Britain, biographies of the Ordnance Survey and the English Breakfast have also appeared. 55 Resisting relegation, biography can still raise and fulfill expectations of a chronological, substantial, and interesting narrative that deals with real subjects, human or otherwise—a good story, with the added virtue of being true.

Autobiography and Auto/Biography—Mapping Self-Representation

If autobiography studies began in the late 1970s, its institutionalization occurred in the mid- and late 1980s, and its later codification came with the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and works such as Smith and Watson’s Reading Autobiography , the years since 1990 have also seen sustained efforts to define and further theorize the genre in ways that expand its range and history. Handbooks such as the two editions of Linda Anderson’s Autobiography and Laura Marcus’s Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction offer brief, engaging entries into the genre’s past and present. Other efforts to map out auto/biography as a generic marker and critical practice include The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader , edited by Ricia Anne Chansky and Emily Hipchen. Much of the content first appeared in the pages of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies , which they co-edit. Ashley Barnwell and Kate Douglas’s co-edited Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies provides an overview of work being conducted in the field as the 21st century enters its third decade, often with suggestions for future directions. 56

Volumes devoted to theory include Carole Allamand’s book about Philippe Lejeune’s great influence on “ l’autobiographie en théorie ” or Lia Nicole Brozgal’s Against Autobiography . Marlene Kadar’s emphasis on the postmodern is mirrored in edited collections by Ashley et al. and Couser and Fichtelberg, and in Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir’s monograph Borderlines . 57 Other scholars turned their attention to the field’s historical and geographical reach. 58 In the United States, slave narratives have been a major subject for research. William L. Andrews’s To Tell a Free Story and Slavery and Class in the American South have been major contributions to this field. 59 If we add Rachel McLennan’s American Autobiography , the result is an emphatic rejection of Georges Gusdorf’s highly influential claim that autobiography was an 18th-century product of the Western European Enlightenment. 60

Over the course of his career, Paul John Eakin, one of the early champions of autobiographies as literary texts, has shifted his attention to autobiographies as foundational, even neurological, imperatives in all people. As the titles of How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves and Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative suggest, his close readings of published autobiographies are gestures toward identifying the structures and narratives of consciousness that constitute humans as humans. More philosophical in emphasis, Richard Freadman’s Threads of Life shares Eakin’s conviction that autobiography offers valuable information about human nature. 61 Autobiography has however attracted most critical and theoretical interest in the realm of the political, often with feminism as the starting point. Liz Stanley’s The Auto/Biographical I and Laura Marcus’s Auto/Biographical Discourses were influential British monographs; and Broughton and Anderson’s edited collection, Women’s Lives/Women’s Times , turned the tables by suggesting that autobiography could contribute to feminist theory, as well as the other way around. Many of these monographs and collections were powerfully shaped by work on the distinctiveness of women’s writing, most notably the autobiographical/theoretical texts of Hélène Cixous such as Rootprints , which emerged from her famous writings in the 1970s on l’écriture féminine . Noted memoirists such as Jill Ker Conway, in her When Memory Speaks , also evaluate how differently men and women understand and write about their lives. 62

Other scholars have worked to establish traditions of women’s self-representation, whether Florence S. Boos in Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women ; Laura Beard’s Acts of Narrative Resistance , which focuses on autobiographical writing in the Americas; or Marilyn Booth’s Journal of Women’s History special issue, “Women’s Autobiography in South Asia and the Middle East.” Some of the most visible theoretical works address the challenges of speaking out through autobiography against political or social repression. A 2008 special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly was simply entitled “Witness.” Two of the best-known monographs are Gillian Whitlock’s Soft Weapons , which investigates the strategies Middle Eastern women employ to attract Western audiences in order to inform them about life during a time of forced globalization, emigration, and wars on terror; and Leigh Gilmore’s previously mentioned Tainted Witness , which looks at high-profile witnesses such as Anita Hill and Rigoberta Menchú to analyze the relationship between gender and credibility within patriarchal cultures. 63

Though strongly influenced by feminist theory, other critics and theorists extend their discussions of testimony out to a wide range of locations and chosen media. Cynthia Franklin and Laura E. Lyons co-edited “Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing” as a special issue of Biography . The essays in Tracing the Autobiographical , edited by Marlene Kadar and colleagues, explore the interplay between genre, location, national politics, ethics, and life narrative. Although Leigh Gilmore entitled her 2000 monograph The Limits of Autobiography , subtitled Trauma, Testimony, Theory— and although a 2008 Southern Review special issue explores “The Limits of Testimony”—developments such as the Me Too movement suggest that personal witnessing by the abused or persecuted will continue to attract the attention of autobiography scholars. 64

A similar impulse accounts for the close attention being paid to autobiographical sub-genres. Prominent among these is memoir, which some would argue should become the covering term. G. Thomas Couser’s Memoir: An Introduction offers a concise yet rich overview of the form, with an emphasis on American memoir, while Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History provides a detailed account of the form’s fortunes over time. Both Couser and Yagoda move smoothly between “literary” examples and more commercial texts, acknowledging that popular publications of the 21st century are primarily responsible for many critics and reviewers declaring that we are living during a memoir “boom.” As with autobiography, however, some critics are hesitant to let this form of life writing refer to almost any mode of self-representation. A 2018 edited collection describes its task as Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir . 65

Autobiography scholars have also directed their attention to the less prestigious, and even unpublished sub-genres of written self-representation. Philippe Lejeune’s longstanding interest in personal journals has resulted in articles and books drawing their subjects from over four centuries and a variety of media—from manuscripts to computer screens. On Diary , a collection of English translations on the subject, is similar in its distillation of stimulating thought to On Autobiography , Lejeune’s landmark 1989 collection. The sheer number, variety, and importance of his publications confirm his status as a pre-eminent scholar of self-representation since the 1980s. In French, his work on diary is complemented by such works as Françoise Simonet-Tenant’s Le journal intime . In English, decades before On Diary appeared, Lejeune made an important contribution to Inscribing the Daily , edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff. In that same collection, Helen Buss’s “A Feminist Revision of New Historicism to Give Fuller Readings of Women’s Private Writing” offers another example of how contemporary feminist theory engaged with other theoretical movements, and often did so by drawing upon autobiography as a source for hidden or “sub-literary” women’s texts. 66

Since c. 1990 , the auto- in auto/biography studies has largely set the agenda for theoretical and critical approaches to life writing; indeed, for many scholars, autobiography is all but synonymous with life narrative. But as Marlene Kadar noted in 1992 , the term “life writing” offers possibilities for study that autobiography cannot accommodate, or will even distort, as a survey of what has been pursued under the life banner makes all too clear. 67

Life Writing and Life Narrative—Emergence and Pervasion

In the years since Margaretta Jolly’s Encyclopedia of Life Writing appeared, many substantial works have addressed aspects and practices of life writing as an interdiscipline. Zachary Leader’s On Life-Writing is one of his many publications as a critic, theorist, and editor, and although literary biography is Richard Bradford’s primary interest, in his edited collection Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature , the term serves as a container for the more familiar designations. The title of Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader , a compendium of the most influential essays by two of autobiography’s most prolific and prominent critics, theorists, and editors, does something similar, and in fact many prominent a/b theorists have made the shift, at least in their titles, to a “life” designation. Liz Stanley’s 2013 edited collection is called Documents of Life Revisited , and the title of her 2010 guest-edited special issue of Life Writing is “In Dialogue: Life Writing and Narrative Inquiry.” Perhaps most significantly, almost twenty years after his landmark discussion of metaphors of self, James Olney, the acknowledged founder of autobiography studies, published Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing . 68

The term increasingly appeared in publications about its fortunes in academia. When Miriam Fuchs and I edited a volume for the Modern Language Association’s Options for Teaching series, in the interests of full coverage, we entitled it Teaching Life Writing Texts . A decade later, Laurie McNeill and Kate Douglas’s a/b: Auto/Biography Studies special issue on pedagogy, and the resulting Routledge edited collection, were both called “Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives.” For its two clusters on the subject, the European Journal of Life Writing took the same title as Fuchs and me, with the obvious addition “in Europe.” 69

As has been the case with both biography and autobiography, as part of its codification life writing has undergone a great deal of historical and regional analysis. Sometimes the results are interdisciplinary, such as Penny Summerfield’s Histories of the Self , but in the case of the multi-volume Oxford History of Life-Writing (Zachary Leader gen. ed.) the goal is to produce a comprehensive survey. The first two volumes, covering the Middle Ages and the early modern period respectively, appeared in 2018 . Other decidedly British, period-based publications include David Amigoni’s edited collection Life Writing and Victorian Culture , and Andrew Tate’s special issue of Nineteenth Century Contexts , “Victorian Life Writing.” 70 The historical focus extends to France and Germany in the Modern Language Studies special issue “Co-Constructed Selves: Nineteenth-Century Collaborative Life Writing.” Entirely European surveys include Écrire des vies: Espagne, France, Italie, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle, and German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century . 71

Continuing in the tradition of feminist critical interventions through autobiography, life writing has become a covering term for studies of women’s writing over the centuries and around the world. Some publications explicitly link theoretical positions to life writing; for instance, the Prose Studies special issue devoted to “Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities,” which puts Benedict Anderson’s brand of political science and cultural history into play. Other works employ life writing to map out genealogies of women authors and intellectuals. The edited collection Writing Medieval Women’s Lives reclaims a number of European subjects, and after writing Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing , Julie Eckerle co-edited Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland with Naomi McAreavey. Reversing the pattern, Amy Culley followed up Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850 , a collection co-edited with Daniel Cook, with a monograph entitled British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840 . 72 Susan Civale’s Romantic Women’s Life Writing covers much of the British nineteenth century , as does “Silence in the Archives: Censorship and Suppression in Women’s Life Writing,” a special issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century . Another co-edited collection, Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading , ranges from slave narratives to Virginia Woolf. Finally, in Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism , Margaretta Jolly argues for the enduring power of written correspondence, whether on paper or as e-mail. 73

Delineations of criticism and theory from specific regions have adopted life writing as an organizing principle. “African American Life Writing” is the title of an a/b: Auto/Biography Studies special issue; other volumes dealing with North American subjects include Viola Amato’s Shifts in the Representation of Intersex Lives in North American Literature and Popular Culture , and Katherine Adams’s monograph Owning Up . 74 Ongoing work on European life writing has resulted in several survey collections. Life Writing Matters in Europe , paradoxically published in the Winter-Verlag American Studies series, is one of the more expansive volumes, but the region examined can be more specific, as in Simona Mitroiu’s Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe , or the European Journal of Life Writing ’s cluster “Life Writing Trajectories in Post- 1989 Eastern Europe”—despite the fact that “Eastern Europe” is a highly contested term. 75 A life-narrative focus can also govern work on non-European and non-North American regions, whether Africa, Australia, the Pacific, or South East Asia. 76 As for India, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies has featured a cluster entitled “Narratives of Transformation: Religious Conversion and Indian Traditions of Life Writing,” and Biography ’s 2017 special issue, “Caste and Life Narratives,” has been republished in India as an edited collection. An especially ambitious effort at global reach is Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies , which features essays about Malaysia, Indonesia, South Africa, Great Britain, Hawaiʻi, Iraq, Australia, India, and China as part of its effort to interrogate the dominance of Euro-American theoretical paradigms. 77

A number of prominent scholars have devoted books to decolonial, postcolonial, and diasporic life writing. Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Life-Writing presented itself as “the first critical assessment” of such texts in English. Philip Holden’s Autobiography and Decolonization casts a wide net in its analysis of life writing by Asian and African leaders of countries emerging from imperial occupation, and Gillian Whitlock’s Postcolonial Life Narratives surveys 18th- to 21st-century works by Indigenous and settler life writers on at least four continents. Edited collections include the 2013 special issue of Life Writing entitled “Women’s Life Writing and Diaspora,” and the books Ethnic Life Writing and Histories and Transculturing Auto/Biography . 78

Life writing has become a common component across disciplinary fields. “The Work of Life Writing,” an a/b: Auto/Biography Studies special issue, features articles grounded in family dynamics, working-class autobiography, ethnography, ecological studies, philosophy, medicine, political and social commentary, and institutional investigations. Paul John Eakin’s edited collection The Ethics of Life Writing foregrounds the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, but also explores testimonio , race, disclosure, and life writing as an agent of harm. David Parker’s The Self in Moral Space examines life writing as a site for ethical analysis. Life Writing has published a special issue entitled “Philosophy and Life Writing,” and Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies one called “Life Writing as Empathy.” On a more discursive note, Joan Ramon Resina’s edited collection Inscribed Identities focuses on language as constitutive of the subject. 79

Vulnerability and precarity are central concerns for many life-writing sub-genres. Since the late 20th century , G. Thomas Couser has been the most prominent scholar exploring the relationship between life narrative and disability in his monographs and edited and co-edited collections. 80 Trauma in its various forms has been an important concern for life-writing scholars. Suzette A. Henke’s Shattered Subjects was one of the first publications to address profound physical and psychological upheavals, experienced personally or collectively. Susanna Egan’s Mirror Talk examines how crisis leads to cultural expression in media ranging from film to hybrid literary forms, and from quilting to comics. Miriam Fuchs’s The Text Is Myself explores the different forms life writing can take in response to historical, political, and personal assault. Gillian Whitlock and Kate Douglas’s co-edited Trauma Texts began as a special issue of Life Writing entitled “Trauma in the Twenty-First Century”; another edited collection in this field is Haunted Narratives: Life Writing in an Age of Trauma . 81 Meg Jensen’s The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical discusses prison poems, testimonio , war memorials, and other sites of commemoration as “complex interrogative negotiations of trauma and its aftermath.” Life writing and medicine has been attracting increasing attention. Mita Banerjee’s Medical Humanities in American Studies is a representative example. 82

Trauma can also be collective and global, and life writing often proves to be a crucial factor in judgment and restitution. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith’s Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores how personal narratives often serve as the chosen response to national violence and deliberate crimes against humanity. Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly’s edited collection We Shall Bear Witness , and Katja Kurz’s monograph Narrating Contested Lives , both of which appeared in 2014 , also discuss life writing in the context of human rights. Testimony against institutional abuse is the subject of Melissa Dearey’s Radicalization , and social movements such as Me Too and Black Lives Matter foreground life narrative as a strategy for opposing oppression and violence carried out by state agents and those invested in economic, political, or cultural dominance. Brittney Cooper and Treva B. Lindsey’s co-edited special issue of Biography , “M4BL and the Critical Matter of Black Lives,” combines theory and personal testimony in an innovative manner. 83

Are Life Narratives always Life Writing?

Many critical and theoretical works of the 21st century seem to leave the writing behind—a major reason life narrative is increasingly chosen as the covering term. While Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames is one of the most important books on life writing for many reasons, her attention to the power of images on the understanding of the past, extending even to Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus , has been profoundly influential. By calling attention to the frequent disjunctions between text and photographs, Timothy Dow Adams’s Light Writing & Life Writing is also a transitional text of sorts, anticipating the emergence of comics and other visual and verbal hybrids as major sites for examining life representation. 84 “Autographics,” a Biography special issue co-edited by Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, is one of many collections and monographs that explore how life narratives are embodied in comic and other graphic forms. Hillary Chute, a prolific editor, interviewer, archivist, critic, and theorist of comics, has published two monographs that document the intersections of comics, life writing, feminism, and history: Graphic Women and Disaster Drawn . 85 Michael A. Chaney’s Reading Lessons in Seeing , and his edited collection Graphic Subjects , are substantial contributions to theorizing the interplay between life writing and comics. Elisabeth El Refaie’s Autobiographical Comics is another extended study, and Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley’s co-edited collection Canadian Graphic is devoted to a single country’s comics life-writing production. 86

Critical and theoretical work on other hybrid genres includes Anna Poletti’s Intimate Ephemera , Ellen Gruber Garvey’s Writing with Scissors , and Hertha D. Sweet Wong’s Picturing Identity , which discusses forms ranging from book art to comics to sketch illustrations to geographic installations. Almost any life-writing analysis must now engage with the pervasiveness of visual representation, which can be recognized as having been an important component for many centuries as well. For instance, the texts examined in Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall’s Witnessing Girlhood , a study of testimonial traditions that draws together gender, youth, and race, range from slave narratives and testimonio to comics and picture books. 87

Responding to the proliferation of critical and theoretical engagements across genres, media, and disciplines, in a special issue of Life Writing , and a subsequent book, co-editors David McCooey and Maria Takolander ask what “the limits of life writing,” if any, might be. Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser implicitly ask the same question in their co-edited Biography special issue entitled “(Post)Human Lives”; and in another Biography special issue, “Life Writing and Corporate Personhood,” co-editors Purnima Bose and Laura E. Lyons's examine how analogies to human life narratives pervade institutional and business self-promotion. Grounding lives in natural environments is the organizing principle for Alfred Hornung and Zhao Baisheng’s co-edited collection Ecology and Life Writing . 88 Just as trade publishers are labeling engaging narratives about anything from God to salt as biographies, so the critical concept of life writing is being stretched to contain virtually anything that presents or mimics a human story.

In terms of critical and theoretical attention, however, no medium for life narratives has been more immediately recognized in its emergence, or more closely examined, than what a pair of Biography special issues have identified as “Online Lives” and “Online Lives 2.0.” Anna Poletti and Julie Rak address the same phenomenon in their edited collection Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online . 89 The prevalence, and even dominance, of life narratives in online environments has caused critics and theorists to recalibrate their work to account for this migration and mediation. This is especially true for studies of young life writers. The title of Emma Maguire’s book Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies takes for granted that the narratives to be discussed will be online, and Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti’s Life Narratives and Youth Culture ranges from more traditional memoirs, letters, and diaries to social media. 90

Moving beyond the exclusively written has also revivified a longstanding awareness of biography as performance. Popular from film’s earliest days, the biopic has attracted substantial critical and theoretical attention. George Custen’s pathbreaking volume Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History was published in 1992 , and a Biography special issue entitled “The Biopic,” edited by Glenn Man, appeared in 2000 . Originally a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies , William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer’s co-edited Invented Lives, Imagined Communities dwells on the history and the cultural shaping force of film biographies. While providing a historical overview, Dennis Bingham’s massive Whose Lives Are They Anyway? focuses on post-World War II films, with a particular emphasis on biopics with women subjects. Tom Brown and Belén Vidal’s co-edited collection The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture takes on a similar subject. 91 Biopic critics’ interest in actors and impersonation links their work to life-writing studies of performance. Ryan Claycomb’s Lives in Play argues that since the 1970s, life narratives have been central to the construction and performance of feminist theater. A special issue of LiNQ: Connected Writing and Scholarship entitled “Performing Lives” focuses upon the literal and metaphorical aspects of performance resulting from life writing’s migration “into other media including film, television, online, theatre, and the gallery.” Other scholars are studying those figures whose performance of their public identities led to great and enduring notoriety or acclaim. Clara Tuite’s Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity subordinates the events of Byron’s life to a study of the fascination he aroused, and continued to arouse, in the public. Daniel Herwitz discusses celebrity in The Star as Icon , and Katja Lee and Lorraine York tackle a similar subject in their co-edited collection Celebrity Cultures in Canada , though they restrict their stargazing to a single country. 92 Fan studies are an integral part of popular-culture scholarship, employing a vocabulary awash in terms such as idols, icons, influencers, and “reality” stars.

The quotation marks around “reality” point to a critical commonplace about life writing—that as acts of representation, such texts necessarily employ fictional materials and constructs. The veracity claims of life-writing texts, captured in a term like non-fiction, are always under scrutiny, and sometimes considered subordinate to concerns with aesthetics or craft—a belief expressed in the term “creative non-fiction.” Efforts to blur or eliminate the borders between fiction and non-fiction are often motivated by a desire to absorb life narratives back into the domain of literature, and principally prose fiction, where the commitment to art may require writers to remake historical fact or the contents of memory in response to the demands of form and aesthetics. Although Serge Doubrovsky is credited with coining the term “autofiction” in the 1970s to describe his own work, many critical and theoretical monographs treat this process as their principal concern, among them Max Saunders’s Self-Impression , and Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir’s Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction . Edited collections also address the significance of these generic boundaries. Chief among these is Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf’s three-volume Handbook of Autobiogography/Autofiction . In Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos of Our Times, Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Cynthia M. Chambers, and Carl Leggo suggest that the interplay between personal histories and aesthetics has a profound moral component, while the title Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction suggests where that volume’s editors consider the most interesting of those experiments to occur. A related juxtaposition appears in the title of Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Catherine Viollet’s co-edited volume Genèse et autofiction , and the title of Helena Grice’s Asian American Fiction, History, and Life Writing lays out a continuum of sorts. 93

The greatest champion for biofiction as a sub-discipline is critic and theorist Michael Lackey, who has written, edited, or co-edited numerous books and collections. 94 It is fair to say that those interested in biofiction are primarily concerned with how the historical is drawn into the literary, and that the resulting sub-genre’s appeal is not its historical veracity, but its enlistment of history and biography in the cause of literary aesthetics. One parallel but distinctly different area of interest regards the hoax life narrative. Susanna Egan’s Burdens of Proof evaluates a number of texts produced through literary imposture, and Nancy K. Miller’s “The Entangled Self” is an astute and suggestive discussion of the issue. 95

The discussion has travelled full circle—from a virtual abandonment of the desire to see life writing as literature, or even necessarily verbal, with a corresponding emphasis on the cultural, political, visual, or virtual, to a reassertion of literature, and more specifically prose fiction, as setting the highest and most appropriate standards for writers of historically and biographically informed creative prose. The journey itself, however, suggests just how capacious the term “life writing” has become.

Future Thoughts—Life, Biobits, and the Environment

Marlene Kadar argued in 1992 that life writing had to extend itself beyond genre to critical practice. 96 In the intervening years, the number of genres and sub-genres, the amount of critical and theoretical attention, and the variety of practices undertaken have increased at an accelerating rate. It seems appropriate to close with some observations about how rethinking certain components of life writing as understood, theorized, and practiced might lead to new directions and widened perspectives. Those components are the fundamental ones—“life” and “writing/narrative.” Lauren Berlant offers insights into the first, and Marlene Kadar the second. With Kadar again providing the enabling metaphor, the discussion will finally turn to what should be the next theoretical transition for life writing—from practice to environment.

After being invited to witness “Life Writing and Intimate Publics,” the 2010 International Auto/Biography Association conference held in Sussex, United Kingdom, Lauren Berlant was asked her opinion about how the participants had dealt not only with her famous term, but also with life writing, the organization’s reason for being. Berlant confessed she was “worried about the presumed self-evident value of bionarrative”:

I kept asking people to interrogate how the story of having a “life” itself coasts on a normative notion of human biocontinuity: what does it mean to have a life, is it always to add up to something? . . . To my ear, the genre of the “life” is a most destructive conventionalized form of normativity: when norms feel like laws, they constitute a sociology of the rules for belonging and intelligibility whose narrowness threatens people’s capacity to invent ways to attach to the world. 97

Berlant’s comment is very helpful, because it prompts us to look seriously at the “bio” of autobiography and biography, and at the “life” of life writing. She suggests locales where this interrogation is already underway:

Queer, socialist/anti-capitalist, and feminist work have all been about multiplying the ways we know that people have lived and can live, so that it would be possible to take up any number of positions during and in life in order to have “a life.” 98

Such work has expanded the range and value of life writing as a practice; an even stronger commitment to determining what is meant by “a life” can only lead to new possibilities for socially and politically engaged scholarship.

But Berlant is suspicious of “writing” as well, and not because the attention of so much scholarship has been redirected to graphic narratives, or online. Her concern about the “self-evident value of bionarrative” also suggests that replacing “life writing” with “life narrative” as the covering term might still set an uninterrogated limit on what we should be examining. Entertaining the possibility of “a biography of gesture, of interruption,” Berlant asks rhetorically “Shouldn’t life writing be a primary laboratory for theorizing ʻthe event’?” 99 Marlene Kadar argues that such theoretical practice is already happening. In her essay “The Devouring: Traces of Roma in the Holocaust,” she campaigns for including “the fragment and trace as member-genres in the taxonomy of auto/biographical practices” outlined in such theoretical works as her own “(flawed) 1992 definition of life-writing texts.” 100 Drawing upon Blanchot’s sense of the fragment as “an unfinished separation that is always reaching out for further interpretation,” Kadar suggests that when confronted with the near-erasure of all evidence that a life was ever lived, we can register affect even when lacking narrative. Any surviving evidence of a life can potentially express “more than what happened,” and anything that “helps us to understand what the particular event means to the subject, can be read as autobiographical.” Whether a song, a tattoo, an anecdote, or a name on a list, in its evocative yet resisting brevity, the fragment speaks of a life without providing even the outline of a realized narrative—“what it felt like, not exactly what it was like.” 101 Kadar therefore sets forth “the fragment and trace as genres that both contribute to our previous theorizations” of autobiography and life narrative, but “also as necessarily unfinished genres that call out to us to attempt to finish them”—often with important critical and political results. 102 One might add that, in discursive terms, the fragment or trace can be thought of as analogous to the morpheme—they are the smallest units recognizable as evidence of a life. With an embedded reference to virtual and online representation, these fragments and traces might be termed “biobits.”

The biobit would represent the micro limit of life writing theory; drawing upon but extending Kadar once more, one can suggest what the macro might be. In “Whose Life Is It Anyway? Out of the Bathtub and into the Narrative,” Kadar insists on the need to “theorize a new genre that still goes beyond and yet includes the old word [autobiography], the old gender, and the old style,” but will also “name what is now.” But this new genre must differ markedly from our common understanding, because “like water,” which “assumes the shape of the vessel” containing it, the nature of the contents of this new genre will not be determined or defined by the container. The “essence” of genre “can never really be captured.” 103 To elaborate on this thought, Kadar turns to a novel by Gail Scott. While most of the main character’s life takes place in a bathtub, we know that at some point she will have to leave it—a move that will carry her “Out of the Bathtub and into Narrative.” Life writing, then, is best thought of not as a container, a genre, or a practice, but to the greatest extent possible, as a component of uncontained water: an ocean, an environment in which micro biomass—biobits—coexists with the largest, most familiar, most coherent examples—the biographies and autobiographies, the autoethnographies and the biopics, the online presences and the comics. Though all are in some way engaged in and linked through bio-representation, only some are implicated in writing, or even in narrative.

If viewed in this way, all of life writing’s inherited genres and sub-genres remain useful and productive methods for describing, comparing, and acting. But it must always be remembered that neither genre nor practice is sufficient as a ground or container for theorizing what may still be called life writing or life narrative, but could perhaps be more accurately referred to as signs of life.

1. See Julie Rak, “Marlene Kadar’s Life Writing: Feminist Theory outside the Lines,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 33, no. 3 (2018): 541–549 ; Marlene Kadar, “Coming to Terms: Life Writing—From Genre to Critical Practice,” in Essays on Life Writing , ed. Marlene Kadar (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992 ), 3–16, quotation at 4; and Donald J. Winslow, Life-Writing: A Glossary of Terms in Biography, Autobiography, and Related Forms , Biography Monographs (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1980 ). Winslow’s book first appeared as Donald J. Winslow, “Glossary of Terms in Life Writing,” pts. 1 and 2, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1978): 61–78; and 1, no. 2 (1978): 61–85.

2. For the phrase “the New Critical wolf,” see Marlene Kadar, “Whose Life Is It Anyway? Out of the Bathtub and into the Narrative,” in Kadar, Essays on Life Writing , 152–161, at 154. For the other quotations, see Kadar, “Coming to Terms,” 4–6.

3. Kadar, “Coming to Terms,” 9.

4. Kadar, “Coming to Terms,” 10.

5. Kadar “Coming to Terms,” 12. Kadar notes that her argument here is informed by pp. 162–165 of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “To Write My Self: The Autobiographies of Afro-American Women,” in Feminist Issues in Literature Scholarship , ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987 ), 161–180.

6. James Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical , ed. James Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980 ), 3–27.

7. For a sampling of such texts, see Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians , reprinted ed. (London: Penguin, 1990 ; 1st ed. 1918); Harold Nicolson, The Development of English Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1928 ); Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: Norton, 1987 ); and Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984 ). For a post-structuralist approach to biography, see William H. Epstein, ed., Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991 ).

8. James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972 ).

9. Ricia Anne Chansky, “General Introduction,” in The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader , eds. Ricia Anne Chansky and Emily Hipchen (London and New York: Routledge, 2016 ), xx–xxii, quotations at xx and xxi.

10. Sidonie Smith, “Foreword,” in Chansky and Hipchen, The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader , xvii–xix, at xviii.

11. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998 ).

12. See, for example, Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” Modern Language Notes 94, no. 5 (1979) : 919–930; and Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977 ).

13. Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” in On Autobiography , by Philippe Lejeune, trans. Katherine Leary, with a foreword by Paul John Eakin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3–30 (the essay was originally published in French in 1977); Paul John Eakin, Fictions of Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) ; and Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Ithaca, NY: Princeton University Press, 1992) .

14. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) ; and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) .

15. For works by the authors and editors mentioned in this paragraph, see the “Further Reading” section.

16. Margaretta Jolly, ed., Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms , 2 vols. (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001) , quotations at ix and x.

17. Jolly, Encyclopedia , ix, x; and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) .

18. Jolly, Encyclopedia , ix, x.

19. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives , 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) , 2. The first edition was published in 2001; for convenience this article quotes from the second edition.

20. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 3, 4.

21. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 211, citing Smith and Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory .

22. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 211.

23. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 204–205.

24. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 214. The works they mention are: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) ; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) ; and Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) .

25. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 216. They cite John Paul Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) ; and Nancy K. Miller, “Representing Others: Gender and the Subjects of Autobiography,” Differences 6, no. 1 (1994) : 1–27.

26. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 215.

27. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 218.

28. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 234. Their Appendix A is at 253–286.

29. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) , pp. 121–126. There isn’t a citation for Kadar—that’s me saying she would agree with Williams on this. The Williams distinction is a commonplace by now.

30. Kadar, “Coming to Terms,” 10.

31. I have written at some length about this in relation to Renders and De Haan and the Biographers International Organization, with particular attention paid to Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly , which I co-edit; the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Center for Biographical Research, which I direct; and the International Auto/Biography Association-Listserv, which I manage. See Craig Howes, “What Are We Turning From? Research and Ideology in Biography and Life Writing,” in The Biographical Turn: Lives in History , eds. Hans Renders, Binne de Haan, and Jonne Harmsma (London and New York: Routledge, 2016) , 165–175.

32. Hans Renders, “Biography in Academia and the Critical Frontier in Life Writing,” in Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing , eds. Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (Leiden: Brill, 2013) , 169–176, at 169. Michael Holroyd, “Changing fashions in biography,” The Guardian , 6 November 2009 .

33. Renders, “Biography in Academia,” 172.

34. Renders, “Biography in Academia,” 172.

35. For a more detailed account of this suspicion, see Craig Howes, “Ethics and Literary Biography,” in A Companion to Literary Biography , ed. Richard Bradford (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2018) , 123–142. It should be noted that while they may share an aversion to criticism and theory, if anything, literary artists often have a greater contempt for biographers.

36. Julie Rak, Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013) , quotations at 4 and 3; and Julie Rak, ed., “Pop Life,” special issue, Canadian Review of American Studies 38, no. 3 (2008) .

37. Leigh Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017) .

38. Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) ; Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) ; Andrew Brown, A Brief History of Biographies: From Plutarch to Celebs (London: Hesperus, 2011) ; Catherine N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives; Themes and Genres . Twayne's Studies in Literary Themes and Genres (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) ; and Paula R. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) .

39. Carl Rollyson, Biography: An Annotated Bibliography (Pasadena, CA: Salem, 1992) . Among Rollyson’s many other works are: Carl Rollyson, Reading Biography (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2004) ; Carl Rollyson, A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005) ; and Carl Rollyson, Confessions of a Serial Biographer (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2016) .

40. Carl Rollyson, Biography: A User’s Guide (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008) ; and Nigel Hamilton and Hans Renders, The ABC of Modern Biography (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018) .

41. Edel, Writing Lives ; Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002) ; Rollyson, Confessions ; Nigel Hamilton, How To Do Biography: A Primer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) ; and Hamilton, Biography .

42. John Batchelor, ed., The Art of Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) ; Warwick Gould and Thomas F. Staley, eds., Writing the Lives of Writers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) ; Robert Dion and Frédéric Regard, eds., Les nouvelles écritures biographiques (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2013) ; and Richard Bradford, ed., A Companion to Literary Biography (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019) . My essay “Ethics and Literary Biography” appears in Bradford’s collection.

43. Michael Benton, Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) ; Rana Tekcan, Too Far for Comfort: A Study on Biographical Distance (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2015) ; and Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) . She mentions her reservations at 130.

44. Barbara Caine, Biography and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) ; Hans Renders and Binne de Haan, eds., Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (Leiden: Brill, 2013) ; Renders, de Haan, and Harmsma, The Biographical Turn ; and Tanya Evans and Robert Reynolds, “Introduction to this Special Issue on Biography and Life-Writing,” disclosure 21 (2012) : 1–8.

45. Atiba Pertilla and Uwe Spiekermann, eds., “Forum: The Challenge of Biography,” special section, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 55 (2014) ; and Sarah Panter, ed., Mobility and Biography , Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte / European History Yearbook 16 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015) .

46. Tomas Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) ; Stephanos Efthymiadis, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography , vol. 2, Genres and Contexts (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014) ; Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) ; Sarah Mombert and Michèle Rosellini, eds., Usages des vies: Le biographique hier et aujourd’hui (XVIIe–XXIe siècle) (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2012) ; and Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century “Hidden” Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) .

47. Examples of such work include: Robin Humphrey, Robert Miller, and Elena Zdravomyslova, eds., Biographical Research in Eastern Europe: Altered Lives and Broken Biographies (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2003) ; Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir et al., eds., Biography, Gender and History: Nordic Perspectives (Turku: K&H, 2017) ; and Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Toisten elämät: Kirjoituksia elämäkerroista (Avain, 2017) .

48. Wilhelm Hemecker, ed., Die Biographie—Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009) ; Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders, eds., with Gregor Schima, Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018) ; Bernhard Fetz and Wilhelm Hemecker, eds., Theorie der Biographie: Grundlagentexte und Kommentar (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011) ; and Bernhard Fetz, ed., Die Biographie—Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009) . All these except the Hemecker and Saunders volume were published by De Gruyter on behalf of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute.

49. Marta Dvorak, ed., Biographical Creation / La création biographique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires Rennes, 1997) .

50. Susan Tridgell, Understanding Our Selves: The Dangerous Art of Biography (New York: Peter Lang, 2004) ; and Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave, 2020) .

51. Alan C. Elms, Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) ; William Todd Schultz, ed., Handbook of Psychobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) ; and Dan P. McAdams, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) .

52. See, for example, Carolyn L. White, ed., The Materiality of Individuality: Archaeological Studies of Individual Lives (New York: Springer, 2009) ; Ann L. W. Stodder and Ann M. Palkovich, eds., The Bioarchaeology of Individuals (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012) ; Michaela Köttig et al., eds., “Biography and Ethnicity,” special issue, Forum: Qualitative Social Research 10, no. 3 (2009) ; and Sophie Day Carsten and Charles Stafford, eds., “Reason and Passion: The Parallel Worlds of Ethnography and Biography,” special issue, Social Anthropology 26, no. 1 (2018) : 5–14.

53. Alice Te Punga Somerville, Daniel Heath Justice, and Noelani Arista, eds., “Indigenous Conversations about Biography,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2016) : 239–247; Noenoe K. Silva, The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) ; Melanie Unseld, Biographie und Musikgeschichte: Wandlungen biographischer Konzepte in Musikkultur und Musikhistoriographie (Cologne: Böhlau, 2014) ; and Anna Jackson, ed., “The Verse Biography,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39, no. 1 (Winter 2016) .

54. Alice Te Punga Somerville and Daniel Heath Justice, “Introduction: Indigenous Conversations about Biography,” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2016) : 239–247, at 243.

55. Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000) ; Peter Ackroyd, London: The Concise Biography (London: Vintage, 2012) ; Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (London: Granta, 2011) ; and Kaori O’Connor, The English Breakfast: The Biography of a National Meal, with Recipes , rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) .

56. Linda Anderson, Autobiography , 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2010 ; 1st ed. 2001); Laura Marcus, Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) ; Chansky and Hipchen, The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader ; and Kate Douglas and Ashley Barnwell, eds., Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies (London: Routledge, 2019) .

57. Carole Allamand, Le “Pacte” de Philippe Lejeune; ou, L’autobiographie en théorie (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2018) ; Lia Nicole Brozgal, Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018) ; Kathleen Ashley, et al., eds., Autobiography and Postmodernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995) ; G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg, eds., True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern (Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1998) ; and Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir, Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003) .

58. For examples of such historical and geographical investigations, see Carsten Heinze and Alfred Hornung, eds., Medialisierungsformen des (Auto-) Biografischen (Konstanz: UVK, 2013) ; Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly, eds., Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006) ; Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly, Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation, 1500–1660 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2007) ; and Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf Dekker, and Michael Mascuch, eds., Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments in Autobiographical Writing since the Sixteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2011) .

59. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of African-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); and William L. Andrews, Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony , 1840–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) .

60. Rachel McLennan, American Autobiography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) . Georges Gusdorf “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” pp. 28–48.

61. Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories ; Paul John Eakin, Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008) ; and Richard Freadman, Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) .

62. Liz Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) ; Laura Marcus, Auto/Biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) ; Trev Broughton and Linda Anderson, eds., Women’s Lives/Women’s Times: New Essays on Auto/Biography (New York: SUNY Press, 1997) ; Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life-Writing , trans. Eric Prenowitz (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) ; and Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1998) .

63. Florence S. Boos, Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women: The Hard Way Up , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) ; Laura J. Beard, Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women’s Autobiographical Writings in the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009) ; Marilyn Booth, ed., “Women’s Autobiography in South Asia and the Middle East,” special issue, Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 2 (2013) ; Kathryn Abrams and Irene Kacandes, eds., “Witness,” special issue, Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, nos. 1–2 (2008) : 13–27; Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) ; and Gilmore, Tainted Witness .

64. Cynthia Franklin and Laura E. Lyons, eds., “Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2004) ; Marlene Kadar et al., eds., Tracing the Autobiographical (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005) ; Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma, Testimony, Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000) ; and Paul Atkinson and Anna Poletti, eds., “The Limits of Testimony,” special issue, Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture 40, no. 3 (2008) .

65. G. Thomas Couser, Memoir: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) ; Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History (New York: Riverhead Penguin, 2009) ; and Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph, eds., Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir (London and New York: Routledge, 2018) .

66. Philippe Lejeune, On Diary , trans. Kathy Durnin, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009) ; Lejeune, On Autobiography ; Françoise Simonet-Tenant, Le journal intime: Genre littéraire et écriture ordinaire (Paris: Téraèdre, 2004) ; and Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, eds., Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996) .

67. Kadar, “Coming to Terms.”

68. Zachary Leader, ed., On Life-Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) ; Richard Bradford, ed., Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) ; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader (Ann Arbor: Maize Books, 2017) ; Liz Stanley, ed., Documents of Life Revisited: Narrative and Biographical Methodology for a 21st Century Critical Humanism (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013) ; Liz Stanley, ed., “In Dialogue: Life Writing and Narrative Inquiry,” special issue, Life Writing 7, no. 1 (2010) : 1–3; and James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) .

69. Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes, eds., Teaching Life Writing Texts , Options for Teaching (New York: Modern Language Association, 2008) ; Laurie McNeill and Kate Douglas, eds., “Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives,” special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32, no. 1 (2016) ; Laurie McNeill and Kate Douglas, eds., Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives (London and New York: Routledge, 2018 ); Dennis Kersten and Anne Marie Mreijen, eds., “Teaching Life Writing Texts in Europe,” special section, European Journal of Life Writing 4 (2015) ; and Dennis Kersten, Anne Marie Mreijen, and Yvonne Delhey, eds., “Teaching Life Writing Texts in Europe, Part II,” special section, European Journal of Life Writing 7 (2018) .

70. Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2018) ; Karen A. Winstead, The Oxford History of Life-Writing , vol. 1, The Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) ; Alan Stewart, The Oxford History of Life-Writing , vol. 2, Early Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) ; David Amigoni, ed., Life Writing and Victorian Culture (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2006) ; Andrew Tate, ed., “Victorian Life Writing,” special issue, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28, no. 1 (2006) : 1–3; and Lynn M. Linder, ed., “Co-Constructed Selves: Nineteenth-Century Collaborative Life Writing,” special issue, Modern Language Studies 52, no. 2 (2016) : 121–129.

71. Danielle Boillet, Marie-Madeleine Fragonard, and Hélène Tropé, eds., Écrire des vies: Espagne, France, Italie, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2012) ; and Birgit Dahlke, Dennis Tate, and Roger Woods, eds., German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010) .

72. Cynthia Huff, ed., “Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities,” special issue, Prose Studies 26, nos. 1–2 (2003) ; Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone, eds., Writing Medieval Women’s Lives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 ); Julie A. Eckerle, Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013) ; Julie A. Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey, eds., Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland , Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019) ; Daniel Cook and Amy Culley, eds., Women’s Life Writing , 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) ; and Amy Culley, British Women’s Life Writing , 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) .

73. Susan Civale, Romantic Women’s Life Writing: Reputation and Afterlife (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019) ; Alexis Wolf, “Introduction: Reading Silence in the Long Nineteenth-Century Women’s Life Writing Archive,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 27 (2018) : unpaginated; Valérie Baisnée-Keay et al., eds., Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading: She Reads to Write Herself , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) ; and Margaretta Jolly, In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) .

74. Eric D. Lamore, ed., “African American Life Writing,” special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 27, no. 1 (2012) ; Viola Amato, Intersex Narratives: Shifts in the Representation of Intersex Lives in North American Literature and Popular Culture (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016) ; and Katherine Adams, Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women’s Life Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) .

75. Marijke Huisman et al., eds., Life Writing Matters in Europe , American Studies Monograph 217 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012) ; Simona Mitroiu, ed., Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) ; and Iona Luca and Leena Kurvet-Käosaar, eds., “Life Writing Trajectories in Post-1989 Eastern Europe,” special section, European Journal of Life Writing 2 (2013) : T1–9.

76. Oliver Nyambi, Life-Writing from the Margins in Zimbabwe: Versions and Subversions of Crisis (London and New York: Routledge, 2019) ; David McCooey, Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) ; Jack Bowers, Strangers at Home: Place, Belonging, and Australian Life Writing (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2016) ; Brij V. Lal and Peter Hempenstall, eds., Pacific Lives, Pacific Places: Bursting Boundaries in Pacific History (Canberra: Journal of Pacific History, 2001) ; Jack Corbett and Brij V. Lal, eds., Political Life Writing in the Pacific: Reflections on Practice (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2015) ; and Roxanna Waterson, ed., Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Narratives and Historical Experience (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007) .

77. Hephzibah Israel and John Zavos, “Narratives of Transformation: Religious Conversion and Indian Traditions of ‘Life Writing,’” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41, no. 2 (2018) : 352–365; S. Shankar and Charu Gupta, “Caste and Life Narratives,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2017) ; and Maureen Perkins, ed., Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2012) . My own essay on Martin Amis appears in this last collection.

78. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation (London and New York: Routledge, 2009) ; Philip Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) ; Gillian Whitlock, Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) ; Suzanne Scafe and Jenni Ramone, eds., “Women’s Life Writing and Diaspora,” special issue, Life Writing 10, no. 1 (2013) : 1–3; Rocío G. Davis, Jaume Aurell, and Ana Beatriz Delgado, eds., Ethnic Life Writing and Histories: Genres, Performance, and Culture (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007) ; and Rosalia Baena, ed., Transculturing Auto/Biography: Forms of Life Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) .

79. Clare Brant and Max Saunders, eds., “The Work of Life Writing,” special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 25, no. 2 (2010) ; Paul John Eakin, ed., The Ethics of Life Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004) ; David Parker, The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007) ; D. L. LeMahieu and Christopher Cowley, eds., “Philosophy and Life Writing,” special issue, Life Writing 15, no. 3 (2018) : 301–303; Rocío G. Davis, ed., “Life Writing as Empathy,” special issue, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 42, no. 2 (2016) ; and Joan Ramon Resina, ed., Inscribed Identities: Life Writing as Self-Realization (London and New York: Routledge, 2019) .

80. G. Thomas Couser, Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997) ; G. Thomas Couser, Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) ; G. Thomas Couser, Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009) ; G. Thomas Couser, ed., “Disability and Life Writing,” special issue, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 5, no. 3 (2011) ; G. Thomas Couser, ed., Body Language: Narrating Illness and Disability (London and New York: Routledge, 2019) ; and G. Thomas Couser and Susannah Mintz, eds., Disability Experiences: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Other Personal Narratives , 2 vols. (Detroit: St. James Press, 2019) .

81. Suzette A. Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) ; Susanna Egan, Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) ; Miriam Fuchs, The Text is Myself: Women’s Life Writing and Catastrophe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) ; Gilian Whitlock and Kate Douglas, eds., Trauma Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 2015) , first published as “Trauma in the Twenty-First Century,” Life Writing 5, no. 1 (2008); and Gabriele Rippl et al., eds., Haunted Narratives: Life Writing in an Age of Trauma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013) .

82. Meg Jensen, The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truths , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave, 2019) , quotation at 8; and Mita Banerjee, Medical Humanities in American Studies: Life Writing, Narrative Medicine, and the Power of Autobiography , American Studies Series 292 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018) .

83. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (London: Palgrave, 2004) ; Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly, eds., We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) ; Katja Kurz, Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014) ; Melissa Dearey, Radicalization: The Life Writings of Political Prisoners (London and New York: Routledge, 2010) ; and Brittney Cooper and Treva B. Lindsey, eds., “M4BL and the Critical Matter of Black Lives,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 41, no. 4 (2018) : 731–740.

84. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) ; and Timonthy Dow Adams, Light Writing & Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) .

85. Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, eds., “Autographics,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2008) ; Hillary L. Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) ; and Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016) .

86. Michael A. Chaney, Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2017) ; Michael A. Chaney, ed., Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011) ; Elisabeth El Refaie, Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012) ; and Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley, eds., Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016) .

87. Anna Poletti, Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008) ; Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) ; Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018) ; and Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall, Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019) .

88. David McCooey and Maria Takolander, eds., “The Limits of Life Writing,” special issue, Life Writing 14, no. 3 (2017) ; David McCooey and Maria Takolander, eds., The Limits of Life Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2018) ; Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser, eds., “(Post)Human Lives,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2012) ; Purnima Bose and Laura E. Lyons, eds., “Life Writing and Corporate Personhood,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2014) ; and Alfred Hornung and Zhao Baisheng, eds., Ecology and Life Writing (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013) .

89. John Zuern, ed., “Online Lives,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2003) ; Laurie McNeill and John Zuern, eds., “Online Lives 2.0,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2015) ; and Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, eds., Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online (Madison: University of Wisonsin Press, 2014) .

90. Emma Maguire, Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave, 2018) ; and Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti, Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) .

91. George F. Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992) ; Glenn Man, ed., “The Biopic,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2000) ; William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer, eds., Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: The Biopic and American National Identity (New York: SUNY Press, 2016) ; Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010) ; and Tom Brown and Belén Vidal, eds., The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture , AFI Film Readers (London and New York: Routledge, 2014) .

92. Ryan Claycomb, Lives in Play: Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012) ; Victoria Kuttainen and Lindsay Simpson, eds., “Performing Lives,” special issue, LiNQ: Connected Writing and Scholarship 39, no. 1 (2012) , quotation from the editors’ “Introduction: Performing Lives,” 11–14, at 11; Clara Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) ; Daniel Herwitz, The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) ; and Katja Lee and Lorraine York, eds., Celebrity Cultures in Canada (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016) .

93. Max Saunders, Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) ; Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir, Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) ; Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction , 3 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019) ; Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Cynthia M. Chambers, and Carl Leggo, Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos of Our Times (New York: Peter Lang, 2009) ; Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak, eds., Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) ; Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Catherine Viollet, eds., Genèse et autofiction (Paris: Academia-Bruylant, 2007) ; and Helena Grice, Asian American Fiction, History, and Life Writing: International Encounters (London and New York: Routledge, 2009) .

94. Michael Lackey, The American Biographical Novel (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) ; Michael Lackey, Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) ; Michael Lackey, Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) ; Michael Lackey, Biographical Fiction: A Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) ; Michael Lackey, Biofictional Histories, Mutations, and Forms (London and New York: Routledge, 2016) ; and Michael Lackey, ed., “Biofictions,” special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016) .

95. Susanna Egan, Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011) ; and Nancy K. Miller, “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir,” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007) : 537–548.

96. Kadar, “Coming to Terms.”

97. Lauren Berlant and Jay Prosser, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant,” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2011) : 180–187, at 183.

98. Berlant and Prosser, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics,” 182.

99. Berlant and Prosser, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics,” 181.

100. Marlen Kadar, “The Devouring: Traces of Roma in the Holocaust; No Tattoo, Sterilized Body, Gypsy Girl,” in Kadar et al., Tracing the Autobiographical , 223–246, at 223–224.

101. Kadar, “The Devouring,” 243. On the fragment as “an unfinished separation” Kadar is citing Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster , trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) .

102. Kadar, “The Devouring,” 226.

103. Kadar, “Whose Life Is It Anyway?,” quotations at 153.

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A Furious, Forgotten Slave Narrative Resurfaces After Nearly 170 Years

John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged.

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By Jennifer Schuessler

One day in 1855, a man walked into a newspaper office in Sydney, Australia, with an odd request.

The man, later described as a “man of color” with “bright, intelligent eyes” and an American accent, was looking for a copy of the United States Constitution.

The text was procured, along with a recent book on the history of the United States. Two weeks later, the man returned with a nearly 20,000-word text of his own, bearing a blunt title: “The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots.”

The first half offered an account of the author’s birth into slavery in North Carolina around 1815, his escape from his master, his years on a whaling ship and then his departure from “the land of the free” for the shores of Australia, where he went to work in the gold fields.

The second half was a long, blistering condemnation of the country he had left behind, in particular its revered founding document.

“That devil in sheepskin called the Constitution of the United States,” Jacobs wrote, is “the great chain that binds the north and south together, a union to rob and plunder the sons of Africa, a union cemented with human blood, and blackened with the guilt of 68 years.”

The newspaper published the narrative anonymously, in two installments, attributing it only to “A Fugitive Slave.” How it was received is unknown.

The man’s words then sat, unread and forgotten, until a few years ago, when an American literary scholar came across them while digging around one night in an online newspaper database.

Now, it is being published for the first time in 169 years by the University of Chicago Press, under its unflinching original title, with the author’s name — John Swanson Jacobs — emblazoned on the cover.

The rediscovery of a long-forgotten slave narrative would be notable enough. But this one, scholars who have seen it say, is unique for its global perspective and its uncensored fury, from a man living far outside the trans-Atlantic network of white abolitionists who often limited what the formerly enslaved could write about their experiences.

And it comes with an uncanny twist: Jacobs was the brother of Harriet Jacobs, whose 1861 autobiography, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” the earliest known account of the experience of American slavery by a woman, is now seen as a cornerstone of the 19th-century literary canon.

Today, John Jacobs is remembered mostly as a footnote to his sister’s story. But Jonathan D.S. Schroeder, the scholar who rediscovered the narrative said he hopes the book will restore Jacobs to history, placing him in the tradition of Black radicalism from David Walker’s incendiary “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World” from 1829 to the Black Lives Matter movement today.

The narrative is a “spectacular performance of autobiographical freedom.” Schroeder argues. And it raises a deeper question: How would other formerly enslaved people — including Jacobs’s more famous sister — have told their stories if they had been truly able to write freely?

A Homegrown American Genre

Slave narratives have been called the United States’ only homegrown literary genre, if also a complicated one. Well into the 20th century, they were dogged by questions about their authenticity, and the degree to which they had been shaped, or even fabricated, by white editors.

But today, the roughly 200 known to survive are prized both as direct testimony of enslavement and as the seedbed of a literary tradition that stretches from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead (whose novel “The Underground Railroad’ was partly inspired by Harriet Jacobs’s book ).

Schroeder came upon John Jacobs’s 1855 narrative by an odd back door. Back in 2017, he was fresh out of graduate school in English, and trying to turn his Ph.D. dissertation about the history of nostalgia into a book.

Today, we may think of nostalgia, a term coined in the 1680s by a Swiss physician, as a pleasantly wistful state. But it originated as a medical diagnosis , which was often applied to despondent prisoners, soldiers and others seen as “irrationally” homesick, including enslaved people .

One night, after a day of working on a job application, Schroeder was digging around on the internet, trying to blow off “stress anxiety.” He had been reading the 2004 biography of Harriet Jacobs by Jean Fagan Yellin and was fascinated by the fact that both her brother and her son, Joseph, had gone to Australia — “physically pretty much the farthest away from America you could get,” as Schroeder put it.

Joseph died in Melbourne, apparently by suicide, around 1860. Had the cause of death been listed as “nostalgia,” Schroeder wondered? Looking for more information, he started plugging various spellings (and misspellings) of both men’s names into Trove , a database of digitized Australian newspapers.

Almost immediately, two articles popped up, published on subsequent days in April 1855, with the same striking title: “The United States Government by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery.”

“It felt like getting hit by a bolt of lightning,” Schroeder said. But he also didn’t want to get too excited. “I know how often these things turn out to not be what they appear to be.”

The narrative begins with the anonymous author’s birth in Edenton, N.C., where Harriet Jacobs was born. As he read the first installment, Schroeder noticed many other details that lined up with those in Harriet Jacobs’s as-yet unpublished book.

Then, two-thirds of the way through, there was a description of a letter the author had left for his enslaver in 1839, shortly before escaping from their hotel in New York City and fleeing by ship.

“Sir, I have left you not to return,” he wrote. The letter was signed, “No longer yours, John S. Jacob.”

The editors had left a letter off the surname. But this was clearly Jacobs.

“Then, I allowed myself to be hit with the full force of it,” Schroeder said.

The next day, Schroeder contacted Caleb Smith, an English professor at Yale, to ask for advice. Smith, who in 2013 drew headlines for authenticating the earliest known memoir by an imprisoned Black American , from the 1850s, called Jacobs’s narrative an “exciting” find.

“We are accustomed to thinking about slavery in terms of silenced voices, lost stories, lives that left only cryptic traces in the archives,” Smith said in an email. “But the voice here is loud and clear in its rage.”

Manisha Sinha, a leading historian of abolition at the University of Connecticut, called it “a major discovery” and “a wow,” which adds to our understanding of the evolution of Black antislavery activism.

Historians have known John Jacobs as a barely documented player in radical abolitionist circles of the 1840s, who sometimes lectured alongside Frederick Douglass, his neighbor in Rochester, N.Y.

In 1851, Douglass broke with the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, rejecting his view of the Constitution as an irredeemable “covenant with death.” But unlike Douglass, Sinha said, “Jacobs doesn’t give up on his radical indictment of the United States.”

Scattered in the Archives

Schroeder, now 43 and teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design, was initially uncertain what to do with the discovery. A literary agent recommended he research a full biography to publish alongside the text. So Schroeder transformed himself from an interpretive literary scholar into an old-fashioned archive hound.

Today, many scholars of slavery emphasize the silences and biases of the archive. “It’s important to know that the records you are looking at weren’t set up to preserve the life of the person you are writing about, and often quite the opposite,” Schroeder said.

Most scholars had assumed that Yellin, who spent three decades researching Harriet Jacobs, had tracked down most of what could be found about the Jacobs family. (Yellin died in 2023 .) But Schroeder found many previously unnoticed records, including a forgotten oil portrait from 1848 that he believes depicts John.

In Boston, he uncovered court documents describing Jacobs’s great-grandparents’ attempt to escape slavery in the 1790s. In London, he found ship logs that allowed him to trace Jacobs’s wanderings after he left Australia for London in 1856.

From his base in London, Jacobs spent the next 15 years working on ships carrying sugar from the Caribbean, oranges from the Black Sea, cotton from Egypt. He also helped finish the trans-Atlantic telegraph line and, in 1869, sailed to Bangkok on a gunboat delivered as a present for the new king of Siam.

Jacobs, Schroeder writes, “lived a life that was even more incredible than his narrative.” But his traces, he said, were “scattered to the wind.”

In 1860, as Harriet’s book was about to appear, John decided to republish his own narrative. Before a voyage to Brazil, he entrusted the text to a London magazine called Leisure Hour.

The editors chopped it nearly in half , excising most of its political arguments and turning it into a more conventional tale of suffering and escape. And gone was the original title, with its blast at the 600,000 American “despots” who owned fellow human beings.

“They cut out the radical contract that Jacobs asks the reader to submit to,” Schroeder said, “which is to pay attention not to enslaved people in pain, but to the people and laws that create the pain.”

Brother and Sister

John Jacobs died in 1873, a few months after returning to the United States. Today, few of the literary pilgrims who go to Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., to visit Harriet’s grave are likely to pause over the small marker set into the grass nearby, labeled simply “Brother.”

But Schroeder hopes his research will prompt a rethinking of the siblings’ interconnected stories.

Harriet’s book, which includes harrowing descriptions of sexual abuse, borrowed conventions from the sentimental novel, to better appeal to the target audience of antislavery Northern white women. John’s narrative, Schroeder writes, is “unsentimental to its core.” But were their stories originally intended to be so different?

Both siblings, Schroeder writes, began thinking about their books in the period when they lived together in Rochester, in the late 1840s, and possibly “intended for their stories to be read together.” And in the late 1850s, Schroeder writes, John seemed to encourage Harriet, who visited London, to publish her book there.

In her biography, Yellin describes how Harriet spent three years trying to get her book published, which meant getting the imprimatur of white benefactors. Twice, she asked Harriet Beecher Stowe for an endorsement, and was rebuffed. When “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” was finally published in 1861, in Boston, the white editor revised it heavily, and cut a closing tribute to the radical abolitionist John Brown.

At the end of her book, Harriet describes John’s departure for California. What would her finished book would have been like, Schroeder wonders, if she had joined him — and then, like him, continued even farther?

“There were invisible constraints on formerly enslaved authors who remained in the United States,” Schroeder said. Without the two versions of John Jacobs’s narrative, “we wouldn’t see that as clearly.”

Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. More about Jennifer Schuessler

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One Man in his Time: A Memoir, by N.M. Borodin

Review by Karen Langley

Nicholas Borodin (as he is billed here) is something of a man of mystery, at least for the English speaking reader. Apart from his memoir, One Man in his Time , he appears to have no obvious presence online – and for that there may be a good reason… His book, now reprinted by Pushkin Press, was originally published in the heart of the Cold War by a man who had abandoned his country of Soviet Russia, claiming asylum in the UK. So what drove his change of heart, and why did he feel the need to share his story with the world?

Borodin was born in 1905 in Kamensk, Russia, of Don Cossack heritage. As recalled here, his childhood was a harsh and impoverished one, full of superstitions and hardship. However, he was sent to school, but his education was dramatically interrupted by war, revolution and then the devastation of the civil war and the ensuing famine. Indeed, much of his early narrative centres around food, and the impossibility of finding any. He spent some time fighting for the Red Army and the story of this period of his life is stark; the civil war was brutal, with death a regular presence.

The Reds shot our headmaster Bogaevsky dead, because he was White. The Whites hanged the teacher Gorobtsov because he was Red. The Reds shot my schoolmate Obukov and his six-year-old sister, because they sympathised with the Whites. The Whites shot the boy Soloviev and his old mother, because they sympathised with the Reds. Our school no longer existed. The teachers and pupils were either fighting or helping one or other of the sides, and many of them had been killed, some by stray bullets during street fighting . 

However, Borodin was determined to follow a scientific path and in the post-revolutionary period was able to return to education; because of his proletarian background he was given priority for this and despite the poverty and lack of food, he managed to study and gain his qualifications. His field was the research of animal disease and in a country ravaged by famine, the ability to fight whatever might kill livestock was crucial. Therefore, his importance as a Soviet worker could not be underestimated, and Borodin relates his gradual progression until he ends up in a series of high-ranking posts, in charge of institutions and research centres.

It’s not all straightforward, though, as Borodin was living through the 1920s and 1930s in Soviet Russia, a place where fear of betrayal was at its height. The purges went on around him, with friends and colleagues being accused and dragged off, or simply disappearing; Borodin had moments where he was under threat but somehow, whether by luck, keeping his head down or simply moving around a lot, he managed to dodge the bullets.

As his life and career develop, however, the narrative dips into murkier territory. Borodin is approached by the secret police and ends up working with them, being dubbed their ‘scientific adviser’. Needs must, I suppose, and survival is a basic instinct, but this does make slightly unsettling reading. Our scientist worked in Moscow for a while, and perhaps reached a turning point; he witnessed a prominent Soviet official throwing himself under a bus, and promptly relocated to Baku to continue his work there. 

Another turning point came after the end of WW2, when Borodin’s bosses sent him overseas to study the production of penicillin. Visiting the UK and the USA was something of a shock to the system and it was clear that the mission was intended as a propaganda exercise as much as anything else. However, it became obvious to Borodin that he was at risk, as scientists were being purged left, right and centre if they didn’t toe the party line. On a trip to London in 1948 he renounced his Soviet citizenship; what happened after that is a bit of a mystery, to be honest!

One Man in his Time is a fascinating read on a number of levels, not least because Borodin was an eyewitness to world-changing events. He brings a cool scientific eye to what he sees, recording the horrors around him in straightforward prose, and his narrative gives a vivid insight into what it was like to live through his times. The early struggles and suffering, the violence and the famines, and then experiencing the horrors of existing through a period of deep suspicion, not knowing who you could trust – these are all captured quite brilliantly. And yet, this is a book that is quite difficult to read on an intellectual level, as well as a visceral one.

Borodin makes no excuses or apologies for any of his behaviour, and frankly it’s not always good. He is in effect a collaborationist, prepared to work with the Secret Police as it might be interesting, and he seems unconcerned at first about this. Frankly, he appears to be driven by his scientific curiosity and if he can do his work, that’s all that matters. However, as his story goes on, he gradually becomes split, describing his state of mind as if he had two personalities: one which accepted the Soviet line and continued working; and a second which knew that what he was being told was wrong, and that all the ridiculous claims made that it was the Soviets who had made every pioneering discovery was a lie. That dichotomy becomes stronger as the book reaches its end, until Borodin jumps ship, either because he can’t reconcile the two halves of his nature, or because he sees this as the only way of survival. The letter renouncing his citizenship, reproduced at the end of the book, is surprisingly moving.

And here his story ends. There’s no biography of him to be found online, so the reader has no idea what happened to Borodin after his defection. A review of this book from Time magazine in 1955 does state that “Borodin renounced his Soviet citizenship and changed his name. According to his publishers, he now works in England in a job ‘where his scientific knowledge is in full use’.” If that’s the case, he certainly managed to successfully cover his tracks and disappear completely; and the modern reader can’t help wonder about the rest of Borodin’s life and career. 

One Man in his Time is a remarkable book, telling a powerful story of what it was like to live through unspeakable times. Borodin’s prose is not that of the professional writer; other authors covering this period, either in fiction or memoir, have written more lyrically. Some of this could well be the fact that he wrote the book in English, which was not his first language. However, the value of this story is how it gets you inside the head of someone who was canny enough to negotiate his way through war, famine and the purges, surviving until he perceived it was time to jump ship. The story is gripping, and Borodin’s honesty can perhaps be commended. In a period when the world is once more riven with conflict, the book is a timely and sobering reminder of how it is to live under a totalitarian regime, and a warning to modern readers to be wary about what we let our leaders get away with…

Karen Langley blogs at kaggsysbookishramblings and wishes the world would learn tolerance.

N.M. Borodin, One Man in His Time: A Memoir ( Pushkin Press, 2024). 978-1782279952, 366pp., hardback.

BUY at Blackwell’s via our affiliate link (free UK P&P)

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Thunderclap: a memoir of art and life & sudden death, by laura cumming.

Oh, this sounds fascinating! I know I always say this, but I’ll say it again: history is that much more fascinating when it’s told through the eyes of the people who live it. The everyday lives of people show us so much more than a dry recitation of facts.

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"Fidel Castro: My Life, A Spoken Autobiography," by Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet, (Scribner, $40, 724 pp.)

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

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In a volume of memoirs recently translated as "Praised Be Our Lords: The Autobiography," prominent French intellectual Regis Debray evoked the experience of being summoned to an audience with Fidel Castro. This was in the mid-1960s, at the height of the Cuban revolution's influence on young radicals around the world.

He recorded his thoughts well before Ignacio Ramonet, a Spanish journalist who edits the French newsweekly Le Monde diplomatique, spent 100 hours interviewing Castro for the "spoken autobiography" published earlier this month as "Fidel Castro: My Life." But I found myself thinking of Debray's memoir frequently while reading the interviews " for it helped explain the overawed and even cowed manner Ramonet often seemed to manifest as an interviewer.

A philosopher by training, Debray, while in his 20s, had helped translate the improvised strategies and doctrines of Fidel and of Che Guevara into more intellectually rigorous terms. He even followed Che into the jungles of Bolivia " an expedition that ended badly, with Debray lucky to get out alive after three years in prison.

Knowing of that drama gives added flavor to Debray's wry description of the "game without rules" unfolding when a prominent left-wing figure would arrive in Havana from abroad. There were three stages: "The first began at the airport," writes Debray, "where a minder dressed in olive drab would murmur in a low voice: 'Fidel wants to see you,' thus projecting him immediately into a select circle well above and entirely separate from the ordinary pilgrim." The visitor would spend the entire trip waiting for the meeting " perhaps rescheduling his departure date while patiently waiting.

Then, a day before heading home, the revolutionary tourist might hear an urgent message: "Fidel's going to see you." Great emotion, of course, at learning that the Jefe (the Chief) had not forgotten you. Thus so began another round of waiting " now less patient. Days or even weeks later, writes Debray, there would be "the whirlwind arrival of someone of high rank ... in person, announcing in a triumphant tone: 'Fidel's coming.' "

It did not mean he was just around the corner, though. "This acme of expectation could still last anything from 30 minutes to three days," as Debray recalled; "The whole three-act routine could drag on for several months," Debray recalled. Once in the great man's presence, the visitor received expressions of warmth, intimacy and trust.

But Debray " comparing his meetings with Castro to the later experience of working with French President Francois Mitterrand " stressed the difference between the aura of the revolutionary leader and that of an ordinary politician. The Jefe was an aristocrat. He had the grace of a monarch. When he spoke, Debray noted, Castro tended to say "nosotros" (we) rather than "yo."

Now in his 80s, a lion in winter, Castro permits himself to use the first-person singular at many points in "My Life." In declining health since the book was finished, it will be remarkable if he survives until the 50th anniversary, next January, of his victorious entry into Havana. Without adding much to the historical record, "My Life" is certainly far more readable than the memoirs of Albanian leader Enver Hoxha (the only other Communist dictator to tell his life's story). Many things about it are questionable, but Castro's keen awareness of his own place in Cuban and world history never seems like mere vanity.

Yet Debray's observation remains very appropriate. About half of the book can be considered an autobiography, with the rest consisting of a protracted official news conference " extensive pronouncements on the goals, triumphs and ever-brightening future of "the Revolution." That term comes less and less to refer to a historical event (or a political process) than to Castro's self writ large.

At one point, Castro mentions a deep love of Hemingway's novels, in particular, he says, "the monologues, when his characters talk to themselves." Ramonet is much too deferential an interviewer to interrupt Castro's own monologues or challenge him very often. In any case, Castro is a capable raconteur, telling once more the stories of guerrilla combat in the Sierra Maestra that must have been the highlight of many an official dinner party over the past five decades. He is so voluble that it might be easy to overlook the gaps or revisions in the story as it unfolds. Castro was the son of a prosperous landowner, which raises questions about his willingness to betray his ruling-class background and become a populist rebel. He suggests it was a matter of his father having been a self-made millionaire so it would have taken at least another generation for bourgeois ideology to sink deeply into the family.

Perhaps. But the fact that his parents were unmarried until Castro was 17 was hardly a thing that would go unnoticed in a rural community. He never mentions it.

We are told just a little about Castro's involvement as a student in the Orthodox Party " a nationalist group, though by no means one infused with Bolshevik aspirations. Yet we are assured on several occasions that by the early 1950s, when he first led a revolt against President Fulgencio Batista, he was already deeply influenced by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. This certainly makes his revolutionary career seem more consistent, but it probably qualifies as a case of creative backdating. One senses an effort to downplay the fact that his turn to Marxism-Leninism came later, under the influence of his comrade Che Guevara and his brother (and likely successor) Raul.

The pages about Che are especially disappointing. Here, affection yields little more than hagiography: "Che is an example," Castro says. "An indestructible moral force. His cause, his ideas, in this age of the fight against neoliberal globalization, are triumphing."

Put that on the T-shirt, too. But some richer insight into the man's ideas and personality would be good to have, as well. Neither interviewer nor subject proves willing to probe very deeply into questions about the differences in ideology and long-term perspective that emerged between Castro and Guevara in the mid-1960s.

Che voiced sharp criticisms of the Soviet Union's policy toward Third World revolutions, in terms that Moscow could not have failed to misunderstand. Yet for reasons it is puzzling to fathom, Castro insists that his comrade "had no conflicts with the Soviets." After four decades, some degree of candor on the subject seems at least imaginable " but it won't be found here.

Responsibility for the book's limitations falls only in part on Castro himself. As a prominent spokesman for the "alterglobalization" (alternative globalization) movement and the editor of one of the most influential journals of opinion, Ramonet doubtless enjoyed somewhat more streamlined access to the Jefe than Debray had in the mid-'60s. But having won an audience, Ramonet seems to have been unwilling to risk losing it.

"Here, no one has ever been imprisoned for being a dissident or because they see things from the way the Revolution does ...," Castro says. "Our courts sentence people to prison on the basis of laws, and they judge counterrevolutionary acts."

Did Ramonet at least fight to keep his jaw from dropping? Did he ponder why writing poetry can qualify as a "counterrevolutionary act" worthy of punishment? Did he consider asking Fidel why " after almost 50 years of the Revolution " citizens cannot be trusted to organize independent labor unions or libraries?

The closest we ever get to a tough question is when Ramonet asks, "Some prosecutors continue to make accusations against the Cuban Revolution, and continually accuse it of all sorts of things. ... What arguments in defense of the Revolution can you offer them?" Seldom has the complaint that journalists serve merely as stenographers to power ever seemed more justified.

In the introduction, Ramonet tries to evade responsibility by dismissing "those who think of the interview as a police interrogation in which there's a cop on one side of the table and a suspect on the other, or as an inquisitorial relationship with a perpetrator of crimes standing before a harsh judge whose job it is to extract a confession."

What extraordinary images to invoke, given the circumstances. Declining to play the interrogator, Ramonet has chosen a different role " that of the courtier, able to flatter the sovereign even when daring to question him.

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New biography aims to reframe the narrative around Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy

25 years after her tragic death, author elizabeth beller sheds a new light on carolyn bessette-kennedy and her marriage to jfk jr., may 22, 2024, what’s next for russia, what comes next after texas school shooting, what's next for abortion rights in america, the new battle for voting rights, how we can build a clean and renewable future, the fight for kyiv, examining extremism in the military, gun violence: an american epidemic, border crisis: what’s happening at the us-mexico border, remembering george floyd: a year of protest, the source of covid-19: what we know, how did the gamestop stock spike on wall street happen, why are people hesitant to trust a covid-19 vaccine, how climate change and forest management make wildfires harder to contain, disparity in police response: black lives matter protests and capitol riot, 2020 in review: a year unlike any other, examined: how putin keeps power, why don’t the electoral college and popular vote always match up, us crosses 250,000 coronavirus deaths, 2nd impeachment trial: what this could mean for trump, presidential transition of power: examined, how donald trump spent his last days as president, how joe biden's inauguration will be different from previous years, belarus’ ongoing protests: examined, trump challenges the vote and takes legal action, 2020’s dnc and rnc are different than any before, what is happening with the usps, voting in 2020 during covid-19, disinformation in 2020, abc news specials on, impact x nightline: on the brink, impact x nightline: unboxing shein, the lady bird diaries, impact x nightline: it's britney, impact x nightline: natalee holloway -- a killer confesses, impact x nightline: who shot tupac, impact x nightline, power trip: those who seek power and those who chase them, the murders before the marathon, the ivana trump story: the first wife, mormon no more, leave no trace: a hidden history of the boy scouts, keeper of the ashes: the oklahoma girl scout murders, the orphans of covid: america's hidden toll, superstar: patrick swayze, the kardashians -- an abc news special, 24 months that changed the world, have you seen this man.

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Elvis Presley’s Family Tree: How Lisa Marie Presley, Riley Keough, and Others Are Related to the “King”

The Presley family has experienced its fair share of drama and heartbreak since Elvis’ death in 1977.

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As for his family legacy, it’s a little more complicated. Elvis married Priscilla Presley on May 1, 1967, and the couple had one daughter, Lisa Marie . However, their divorce five years later and Elvis’ untimely death at age 42 would foreshadow the contentious and, at times, tragic history of his descendants.

Here’s what you need to know about the key members of the Elvis Presley family tree, including Priscilla Presley , Lisa Marie Presley , and Riley Keough .

Priscilla Presley

Relation to elvis: ex-wife.

Priscilla Ann Wagner was born May 24, 1945, in Brooklyn, New York. Following the death of her father only months later, her mother, Ann, remarried U.S. Air Force officer Paul Beaulieu in 1948. The family moved several times and was stationed in Germany when Priscilla met Elvis in 1959 and began a relationship with him at age 14. They married in 1967, had daughter Lisa Marie the next year, and were together until their separation and divorce in 1972. Priscilla also has one son, Navarone Garibaldi Garcia, from a separate relationship. (Garcia is the lead singer of synth rock band Them Guns.)

Priscilla became the executor of the Graceland estate in 1979 and is a successful businesswoman. She has acted—appearing on the soap opera Dallas in the 1980s and in the Naked Gun film series—published the best-selling memoir Elvis and Me in 1986, and also started a line of beauty products. Most recently, the 77-year-old has been in the news for her legal challenge against granddaughter Riley Keough for control of Graceland following Lisa Marie’s death earlier this year.

Lisa Marie Presley

Relation to elvis: daughter.

Lisa Marie Presley was Elvis and Priscilla’s only child; she was born on February 1, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. She moved to Los Angeles with her mother at age 4 when her parents divorced but split time with both of them up until Elvis’ death in 1977 when she was 9.

Lisa Marie dropped out of high school and went to rehab after abusing illegal drugs. There, she met her first of four husbands, musician Danny Keough. The pair married in 1988 and had two children; they divorced in 1994. Lisa Marie was also married to pop superstar Michael Jackson , actor Nicolas Cage , and music producer Michael Lockwood. She had twin daughters with Lockwood.

Like her father, Lisa Marie had a music career. Her first two albums in 2003 and 2005, respectively, debuted in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 and were certified gold. She died at age 54 on January 25, 2023, after suffering cardiac arrest.

Read More about Lisa Marie Presley

Danny Keough

Relation to elvis: former son-in-law.

Danny Keough, born November 6, 1964, is a musician and actor and the first husband of Elvis’ daughter, Lisa Marie. They met in 1985 when Lisa Marie was 20 years old and tied the knot three years later. The 58-year-old is the father of Lisa Marie’s oldest two children, Riley Keough and the late Benjamin Keough.

According to People , Danny and Lisa Marie remained on good terms following their 1994 divorce. He became her bassist during her music career and served as the best man at her wedding to her fourth husband, Michael Lockwood, in 2006. The two were even living together in a rented property at the time of Lisa Marie’s death, according to In Touch Weekly .

Riley Keough

Relation to elvis: granddaughter.

Danielle Riley Keough, born May 29, 1989, is the eldest child of Lisa Marie Presley and Danny Keough. A former model for Christian Dior and Dolce and Gabbana, she has transitioned into a successful acting career.

Riley, 33, made her film debut in the 2010 musical biopic The Runaways and has since appeared in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), American Honey (2016), Logan Lucky (2017), and Zola (2020). She also earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series for her role as Christine Reade on the Starz drama The Girlfriend Experience .

In 2023, Keough played the title character in the Amazon Prime Video series Daisy Jones & the Six . She is also involved in a legal battle with her grandmother Priscilla over control of the Graceland property following her mother’s death.

Read More about Riley Keough

Benjamin Keough

Relation to elvis: grandson.

Benjamin Storm Presley Keough, born October 21, 1992, was the second child of Lisa Marie Presley and Danny Keough. A musician, Benjamin signed a record deal with Universal in 2009 for $5 million, according to Variety , but never released any music under the agreement.

Benjamin died by suicide at age 27 on July 12, 2020, and is buried at Graceland. He was known for his physical resemblance to his superstar grandfather. Despite his family’s fame, he stayed relatively clear of the public eye. Following Benjamin’s death, his longtime friend Brandon Howard told People he “wasn’t a spoiled kid. He was very humble, very giving, very loving, especially to his friends.”

Michael Lockwood

Michael Lockwood, born May 21, 1961, is a guitarist and producer who married Lisa Marie Presley on January 22, 2006. He was a member of the band Lions and Ghosts and went on to produce movie soundtracks and collaborate with artists like Aimee Mann, Carly Simon , and Fiona Apple.

Lisa Marie filed for divorce from Michael in June 2016, starting a years-long battle over custody of their twin daughters, Harper and Finley, as well as finances. According to the Daily Mail , Lisa Marie admitted to abusing cocaine over the final year of their marriage. The divorce was finalized in 2021.

Michael, 61, became the twins’ legal guardian in April 2023 following Lisa Marie’s death.

Finley and Harper Lockwood

Relation to elvis: granddaughters.

Finley Aaron Love Lockwood, 14, and Harper Vivienne Anne Lockwood, 14, are the twin daughters of Lisa Marie and Michael Lockwood, born on October 7, 2008.

The two were caught in a vicious custody battle amid their parents’ divorce. They were placed in protective custody with their grandmother Priscilla after Lisa Marie’s legal team alleged Michael had “disturbing” images of children on his computer, according to People . Tennessee investigators closed their inquiry a year later, and the couple’s divorce was complete in 2021.

Along with half-sister Riley Keough, Finley and Harper are beneficiaries of Lisa Marie’s contested trust, which passed down control of the Graceland property.

Tyler Piccotti first joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor in February 2023, and before that worked almost eight years as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. He is a graduate of Syracuse University. When he's not writing and researching his next story, you can find him at the nearest amusement park, catching the latest movie, or cheering on his favorite sports teams.

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Montclair woman sheds light on popular children's author's private life in new biography

Maya Linder loves to watch as the wild horses of Assateague Island off the shores of Maryland and Virginia are rounded up and driven into the water so they can swim during slack tide, heads straining forward, salt water dancing in their manes, to the nearby island of Chincoteague for auctioning.

“The horses were calm,” Linder, a sixth-grader in Hoboken, recalls of past family visits to the annual Pony Penning Days hosted by the islands each July. “One horse had a bird on its back, but didn’t care.”

The scene, as brief at 5-10 minutes as it is thrilling, is the same one that moved Lettie Teague, an author and award-winning wine columnist for "The Wall Street Journal," as a child — when she read a depiction of the ceremony in the bestselling book "Misty of Chincoteague" by Marguerite Henry. Teague grew up in Indiana, Ohio, and North Carolina, pining for her own horse for years. Her mother encouraged her love of horses in part by buying her Henry’s books.

“The one that really resonated for me was Henry’s 'Born to Trot,'” says Teague, who lives in Montclair with her husband. The true story is about a young boy with tuberculosis whose father, a famous harness racer and trainer, gives him a filly to help him recover.

Four years ago, Teague began looking for information on Henry’s life. She was shocked to find that no one had written Henry’s biography. “Henry wrote 59 books, and so many of them were bestsellers,” she says. “How isit possible that this woman who did so much and so memorably, who resonated so deeply with readers, and whose 1947 book, 'Misty of Chincoteague,' still sells 50,000 copies a year, does not have a biography?”

With the encouragement of her agent, Alice Martell, Teague traveled to the University of Minnesota, where Henry’s papers are housed, and Wayne, Illinois, where Henry spent most of her life. The trips left Teague inspired, but hesitant. “I thought, this is crazy, I’m a wine columnist, I write wine books,” says Teague. “Theoretically, I haveno right to write a biography of a children’s author, but on the other hand, why not?” 

Martell, Teague’s agent, was supportive. “I’m always happy when clients do something completely different,” she says. Teague took the leap, and on May 21, her book "Dear Readers and Riders: The Beloved Books, Faithful Fans, and Hidden Private Life of Marguerite Henry," will be released by Trafalgar Square Books.

Researching and writing Henry’s biography took nearly three years, complicated by the fact that Henry was very private and left little ephemera. She was, however, a diligent researcher. “For 'The White Stallion of Lipizza,' she wrote to a librarian in Vienna to learn about the sound a clock made,” Teague says. “She took multiple trips to Skiatook, Oklahoma, to stand in the fields and see what it felt like to be in the Osage grass.”

Henry, who published books from 1940 until her death in 1997 at age 95, wrote back to every child who sent her a fan letter. “We’re talking tens of thousands of letters over the years, and Henry wrote them without artifice or pandering,” Teague says. Henry, who did not have children of her own, developed real relationships with some of her readers, referring to them as her “book children.”

Writing about two great loves

Teague began riding horses at age 9, about the same time she started writing. “Reading and writing were everything in my life, from when I was a child all the way until now,” she says.

At age 16, while living in Deerfield, Indiana, Teague finally bought herself what she calls “a cheap horse.” “We were city people, and we bought a farm of 12 acres, which of course wasn’t a farm by normal standards,” she says. “Because we had land, we could afford to keep a horse.” It was the first of many horses Teague would ride.

Teague attended Kenyon College and joined the equestrian team. She moved to New York City after graduation and rode at Claremont Riding Academy on the Upper West Side. “It wasn’t until I became the wine columnist for 'The Wall Street Journal' that I began riding seriously again,” she says, buying and leasing several horses and competing in local shows. She gave away her last horse two years ago. “I’m temporarily retired from riding, but not completely,” she says. “There’s another horse in my future.”

Her wine education began during her junior year of college in the unlikely city of Dublin, Ireland, where she attended the School of Irish Studies. “It was sheer luck that I ended up living with Peter Dunn and his family. He’s the director of Mitchell & Son, then the most important wine retailer, wholesaler and importer in Ireland,” Teague says. “He talked about wine the way I talked about books. That’s what fascinated me.”

Back in the U.S, Teague got herself into the wine business, holding a variety of jobs in wholesale and retail sales, marketing, public relations, and restaurants. “I ended up acquiring a lot of really practical wine business experience,” she says. She segued into writing about wine at the now-defunct "Diversion" magazine and became wine editor at "Food & Wine" in 1997.

Beth Kracklauer, the food and drinks editor at "The Wall Street Journal," says Teague’s columns appeal to everyone, from those with deep wine knowledge to those just starting to learn. “She has excellent taste but always looks at the consumer perspective,” Kracklauer says.

Teague has received three James Beard writing awards and was inducted into the Wine Media Hall of Fame in 2015. Previous books include Wine in Words: Some Notes for Better Drinking (Rizzoli, 2015) and Educating Peter: How Anybody Can Become an (Almost) Instant Wine Expert (Scribner, 2007). She was the illustrator and co-author of Fear of Wine: An Introductory Guide to the Grape (Bantam, 1995).

Earlier this year, Teague sponsored a “Dear Marguerite National Essay Contest” for youth members of the Interscholastic Equestrian Association. Riders in grades 4-12 were asked to write on themes related to equestrian life, horse welfare, and historical horse figures. The contest received nearly 300 submissions, and the winners were announced in April.

Teague remains in awe of Henry’s talents. “She melded feeling and facts so consistently, I can’t think of another children’s author who has done that,” Teague says. “Henry was incredibly modest. The only thing that was flashy about her was that she wore crazy hats.”

Teague will be discussing and signing Dear Readers and Writers in the Kid’s Room at Watchung Children’s Bookstore, 44 Fairfield St. in Montclair, on Wednesday, May 22 at 7 p.m.

‘WWE Legends Biography’ to Feature Episode on the History of ECW, Premiering June 23

A s reported by PWInsider , fans of professional wrestling can expect the A&E network to air a special episode of the WWE Legends Biography series focusing on the Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) organization. This intriguing episode is scheduled for release on Sunday, June 23.

Titled “Birth of Hardcore,” the documentary is the fourth in-depth examination of the ECW, which operated from 1993 to 2001. Preceding it were WWE’s own Rise and Fall of ECW in 2004, Jeremy Borash’s Forever Hardcore unveiled in June 2005, and the 2013 documentary Barbed Wire City , created by John Philapavage and Kevin Kierman.

The series will not only delve into the gritty history of ECW but will also showcase legends like Eddie Guerrero, Ricky Steamboat, and Rob Van Dam among its various episodes.

FAQs about ‘WWE Legends Biography’ Episode on ECW

What is the premiere date for the ECW episode of WWE Legends Biography?

It is scheduled to premiere on Sunday, June 23 on the A&E network.

What will the ECW episode of WWE Legends Biography be about?

The episode, titled “Birth of Hardcore,” will explore the history of Extreme Championship Wrestling from 1993 to 2001.

Are there any other documentaries about ECW?

Yes, there are three other major documentaries about ECW: WWE’s Rise and Fall of ECW (2004), Forever Hardcore (2005), and Barbed Wire City (2013).

Will other wrestling legends be featured in the WWE Legends Biography series?

Yes, the series will also feature episodes on wrestling greats such as Eddie Guerrero, Ricky Steamboat, and Rob Van Dam.

The “Birth of Hardcore” episode of WWE Legends Biography on A&E is poised to offer wrestling enthusiasts a riveting glimpse into the gritty and revolutionary world of ECW. With the premiere set for June 23, this documentary, alongside other episodes featuring wrestling icons, will undoubtedly be a celebration of the sport’s rich history and the legends who have shaped it.