Life Writing Archive
Saturday, August 9th, 2008
James Frey has been doing the rounds recently, promoting his new book. But the journalists only want to discuss the controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces. Presenting itself as autobiographical, and initially praised for its "honesty", the narrative was later criticised when it emerged that parts of it ...
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Monday, April 14th, 2008
I recently attended a conversation between A.S. Byatt and Stephen Rose at the Purcell Room. They were talking about memory, promoting the anthology Byatt co-edited.
They said many interesting things, but one stood out for me.
Asked to discuss the relationship between memory and the imagination, Byatt explained that she prefers ...
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Friday, April 11th, 2008
What is the story of your life?
It’s been suggested by some that it’s productive at regular points in your life to imagine that you died yesterday, and think about what would be in your obituary.
It’s good to think about the stories other people tell about you, but I think it’s ...
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Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007
Following on from my earlier post about naming myself, I thought I’d do a little series of posts about naming. I’ll start with a subject I’ve been thinking and reading about for some time: Lewis Carroll, and, specifically, the various ways in which biographers have approached the problems presented by ...
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Monday, July 16th, 2007
In The Idler, No. 84 (Saturday November 24, 1759), Samual Johnson writes that an autobiographer “has at least the first qualification of an historian, the knowledge of the truth.”
I disagree, because most of the autobiographies I have read (and the exceptions are very few) have been produced predominantly by the ...
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