Belief is a really, really important part of how we perceive the world: more important than factual truth.

People have been arguing about the existence of God for hundreds of years. Many different sides of the argument have been put forward using historical facts, logic, rational thinking and common sense – alongside passion, guesswork and storytelling. In the end, what side of the fence we sit on is determined, simply, by what we believe.

Belief cannot be based entirely on what we know to be true – the word itself implies doubt. I do not know, I believe – I think this is true.

Belief plays an equally significant role in how we read truth writing like biographies and autobiographies. If nobody had ever believed A Million Little Pieces, there would have been no uproar when the story turned out to contain fiction.

I’ve always found it difficult to accept the view that life writing is different from fiction simply because it is factually true. Factual truth is something external to the text. What happens if we discover that a biography we’ve always loved is not true? The text itself stays the same, but our relationship with it changes. So, it’s not the text alone that matters here, but the relationship between reader and text. As readers, we bring knowledge and experience to the text, and that influences how we perceive it. But above all, we bring belief (or disbelief). Whether or not we believe a story absolutely changes how that story functions for us.

For some people, the Bible tells a story that can influence how we live.

For others, it contains the absolute truth.

The same words work completely differently depending on what, and how, we believe.

When I was too young, my mum tried to explain evolution to me.

She said: “A long time ago we used to be like monkeys, with long thick hair and claws instead of nails. We lived in the trees.”

The first problem was that when she said “we”, meaning the human race, I thought she meant “we” as in her and my dad. So I started to develop a very strange understanding of their early married life.

The second problem was that my only sustained experience of monkeys at that time had been not of the real things, but of Coco the Monkey, the mascot of Coco Pops, my favourite breakfast cereal. I came to the conclusion that my mum used to look like Coco the Monkey.

I had misunderstood the story. I realised that it was a story of origins, but instead of recognising that it was about our collective origin as a species, I’d interpreted it as a story about my parents’ origins as individuals.

I believe that at the heart of storytelling lie two questions: where do we come from, and where are we going?

These stories have been told on the individual level, as various kinds of autobiography, and they’ve also been told on the collective level, as stories about humankind as a whole. The Christian myth, Marxism, psychoanalytic theory, evolutionary theory, and lots of other stories, have all influenced the way human beings see themselves by attempting to explain where we come from and where we’re going.

Our concept of time is linear, and so are the stories we tell. Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I think we like to perceive our lives like that too. The middle is usually now, where we are at the moment. So the puzzle is working out how this particular story began, and guessing how it will end.

The story we tell about ourselves changes as we get older, but the anxiety does not go away – we realise that we are in the middle of something, but we want to understand the whole narrative.

You may have noticed that I’ve inherited the blogger’s love of lists.

Today I’m going to list 20 pieces of life writing (autobiography, biography, anything in between) I’ve enjoyed reading. In most cases, that also means that, in reading them, I learned something new about writing lives.

Over time I want to address why each of these works helped develop my understanding of the genre. So, if the words are clickable, that means you can read more about what these books did for me.

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

Ken Dornstein, The Boy who Fell Out of the Sky

Margaret Forster, Diary of an Ordinary Woman

James Frey, A Million Little Pieces

Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil

Susie Gordon, Peckham Blue

Edmund Gosse, Father and Son

Ian Hamilton, In Search of J.D. Salinger

Richard Holmes, Footsteps

Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

Matthew Alan Kreib, Filling a Gap: Authorship and Identity in Collaborative Autobiography

Roman Krznaric, Christopher Whalen and Theodore Zeldin (eds), The Oxford Muse: Guide to an Unknown University

Karoline Leach, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild

Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Yann Martel, Self

Marjane Sartrapi, Persepolis

Marcus Sedgwick, Blood Red Snow White

Art Spiegelman, Maus

Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built

Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity

Myths are fashionable, especially in biography and other kinds of truth writing.

• Proponents of the myth of Lewis Carroll say that early biographies of the author distorted the facts of his life, creating a fictionalised version of the man.
• Lucasta Miller’s The Bronte Myth makes similar claims about earlier books on the Brontes.
• Outside of biography, there’s the diet myth, E-Myth, the myth of cancer, and lots, lots more.

What normally happens, when a writer tells us about some myth or other, is that he or she then goes on to give us an alternative version of the story.

The thesis is: the first story conceals the truth through myth; the second story reveals it through facts.

I like these books about myths. Karoline Leach’s In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, about the Carroll myth, makes a fascinating analysis of the way in which the conventional view of Carroll was constructed.

But these new versions are myths too.

Leach uses her imagination to construct an alternative view of Lewis Carroll – one which seems to deliberately subvert the traditional image of him. The new story is defined by its opposition to the old one, and its constant reference to facts does nothing to convince me that it is any more (or less) true.

Rather than seeing stories as a potential conduit for truth, I think of the story as having its own truth – the truth is wrapped up in the story.

One of the 10 auto/biographies I’d like to write is the autobiography of my reflection.

I live my life constantly, but my reflection only pops into being every now and then. I could write about any event in my life, but my reflection is only conscious of those moments when I’m looking at myself in a mirror, or can be glimpsed in someone else’s car window.

It would be a filtered life story, but – unlike in themed autobiographies – it might not have a coherent structure.

I do not spend long looking at myself in the mirror. I realised this in my last job, when someone would occasionally say (sarcastically, I imagine), “I like your hair today, Ben.” Suddenly feeling self-conscious, I would take the next opportunity to find a mirror, and realise that I was looking utterly ridiculous, my hair all over the place.

When we were decorating our house, about a year ago, I went into work one day oblivious to the fact that I had specks of white paint all over my glasses. I finally looked in the mirror at lunch time and discovered my error.

So my reflection might harbour feelings of jealousy. It’s attached to me in many ways – it cannot exist without me – and yet I show little interest in it. Does it share my feelings? Does it agree with my decisions? It has no choice – it cannot act, only copy.

To write the autobiography of my reflection would be an opportunity for me to explore the boundary between conventional autobiography and fiction. Like Duncan Brown’s self-portrait, it’d be a kind of third-person autobiography, necessarily conditioned by my own view of myself, and yet this narrative voice would not be my own.

My reflection might not like me. It might be hurt by the things I say and think about it, and might disapprove of the things I do. Or, it might be obsessively attached to me. It might crave my presence so I can bring it to life. Perhaps all of these things would be true.

My reflection cannot speak to me, so I must assume its voice, and imagine, rather than reveal, what its inner life is like.

It’s a fairly standard view that fiction is a way of conveying truth.

Similarly, I hope people are now waking up to the inherently fictional nature of biography and autobiography.

The merging of these forms, though, is nevertheless problematic. The moments of magical realism in Self; the use of animals to portray humans in Maus; the inevitable artifice of verse in The Prelude – all complicate our understanding of auto/biography’s claim to truth.

For me, the fictionalising of an autobiographical narrative is one way of acknowledging that you will never reach the truth – that the closer you look at your own memory, the further you get from the reality of a moment.

Here are two of my attempts at autobiographical fiction.

• Bear tells his story, originally published in Keystone Magazine 5, July 2004
• Narrow, unpublished, written 2003

I’m still quite proud of one of these, and don’t particularly like the other. Nevertheless, I wanted to show both to you, as I’m interested in the process behind autobiographies as much as the finished products.

Let me know what you think.

The stories we tell about ourselves change according to our audience and medium.

For example, I’ve previously discussed the importance of a name: I have reservations about using my real name online, as if there is a danger in allowing people to link my online persona to my real-life one.  Does my writing give away too much about myself – does it tell people things I wouldn’t tell them in person?

I’m probably more honest in an anonymous survey than I often am in face-to-face interactions: the story I tell changes.

In job interviews, marketing pitches, CVs, author biogs, annual reports and press releases, we’re likely to tell a very confident, positive story about ourselves.  Conversely, different perspectives might seep into the other stories we tell – to friends and family, to our diaries, to our blog readers. But these don’t tell the whole truth either.  They’re just different.

A few years ago, I had the idea of creating a new kind of business card.  Rather than telling people my job title, company email address and other bland details, this alternative business card might reveal something a bit deeper about myself.

Here’s what I came up with at the time:

This example of self-representation subverts the normal purpose of a business card – to impress clients, or at the very least present a positive image of oneself.  It’s also possible that my desire to achieve such a subversion influenced the story I told: perhaps I was more negative than I needed to be.  Perhaps this business card didn’t really capture my essence, but instead became the site where all my insecurities oozed and merged and took shape.

I’ve always hated the question I’m often asked at parties: “What do you do?”  The question appears to mean “What do you do for a living?” but so often the answers people give are littered with negatives: “I do this, but really I want to do that.  I’m paid to do this, but it isn’t my life’s work.  My real passion’s for this.”  For many people (myself included), the question invites a negative self-assessment.

It’s telling when the answer to a question is a story: “I used to be a policemen but now I teach acting”, or “I’m a gardener but I hate it.  I want to join the army.”  Narrative conveys movement, the idea that things are changing, that nothing is fixed.  Our present-tense selves always contain the ghosts of our pasts and the echoes of all our possible future selves.  We are transient.

The problem with written narratives like autobiographies (or business cards) is that they create a kind of permanent utterance.  What we mumble at parties vanishes when addled memory erases it, but in writing, we inscribe a temporary state into (potentially) permanent existence.

The mistake people make is thinking that autobiography can sum us up, in an absolute sense.  So many people wait until the ends of their lives – or until something astounding has happened to them – before they begin to tell their story.  I’d prefer it if everyone in the world became a serial autobiographer – if everyone told their stories over and over again, trying out different versions, voices and plots.  Serial autobiographies are a series of utterances that may or may not be true – stories we’ve thrust into the world to see how they fare.

So my business card idea may have been a good one, in principle.  But few companies would accept it, because their stationery costs would rocket as their employees clamoured on a daily (perhaps hourly) basis to change their stories.  Our autobiographies are not permanent.

I’m currently enjoying Body Parts, Hermione Lee’s collection of essays on life writing.  Just as Mark Bostridge’s Lives for Sale did about four years ago, this book is renewing my recently waning interest in reading about biography.  Here’s a quick snippet:

[M]ost biographical facts are open to interpretation.  But they do exist, and lie around biographers in huge files and boxes, waiting to be turned into story.  These facts have owners: they belong to the lives of the biographer’s subject and the people whom the subject knew, loved, hated, worked with or brought up, or perhaps met once in the street in passing.  All these people will feel a claim over the fact that concerns them.

I’ve written a fair bit about facts, and when I studied biography at university some time ago I showed considerable disdain for them.  But passages like this remind me that biography presents problems that are not merely theoretical.

I like the precariousness of life writing – I like the questions it asks about authorship, history, storytelling, reading and writing.  But, while I chatter on about the illusory nature of truth in biography, I forget that it is about real people – people who did live, in spite of the challenges facing their biographers.

It’s possible to become callous about biography when I take this perspective, discussing books like The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky, Wrong Rooms or Maus as “relational narratives” whilst failing to mention that they are also, in essence, human stories about grief, love and guilt.

In her wonderful book, The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm describes (amongst many other things) her hunt for the truth about Sylvia Plath.  In one memorable passage she comes close to Ted Hughes, even approaching his house.  Then, realising that somebody is at home, she retreats, feeling “shame at my complicity in the chase that has made his life a torment”.

How often do we assess lives without remembering that they are the lives of real people?

Here’s a quotation from Kim Edwards’ The Memory Keeper’s Daughter (Penguin, 2005).

She smiled, then waved and walked with Jack down the narrow stone path to the sidewalk.  David watched her go, trying to fix this moment – the vivid backpack, her hair swinging against her back, Jack’s free hand reaching out to grab leaves and sticks – forever in his mind.  It was futile, of course; he was forgetting things with every step she took.  Sometimes his photographs amazed him, pictures he came across stored in old boxes or folders, moments he could not remember even when he saw them: himself laughing with people whose names he had forgotten, Paul wearing an expression David had never seen in life.  And what would he have of this moment in another year, in five?  The sun in Rosemary’s hair, and the dirt beneath her fingernails, and the faint clean scent of soap.

The idea that photographs “fix” the past is a common literary trope.  According to the paradigm, memory is transient, but photographs are permanent, and can drag up a past we wouldn’t otherwise have any recollection of.

This is true to an extent, but what the Edwards quotation fails to acknowledge is that looking at a photograph is an interaction.  In itself, a photograph is meaningless – its significance comes from the interpretation of an observer, who jogs it into meaning.

Earlier, I asked: “What is it that charges our photographs with meaning?”

I’m still not sure.  Of course we use our memory when interpreting an old photograph – our memory tells us who these people are, and might bring to light the old holiday or party where the photograph was taken.

But it’s a vague kind of memory – one that relies (as memory often does) on imagination.  The photograph surprises us, and our imagination conjures a memory into being, filling in the gaps to make sense of this ghost.

So I don’t think it’s entirely true to say that photographs fix the past, because they still depend on memory, the trickster, to make sense out of them.

Do you remember being six or seven years old?

When I was at school, and it was time to do art, every single person in the class sat down and produced a painting.

When it was time for writing, everyone wrote a story or a poem.

The annual school play had everyone in it, and we’d all sing a song when we were asked.

Some people were better than others at each of these tasks, but everyone got involved.  My paintings were always terrible, but I still conveyed something with paint, still produced a work that was distinctly mine.

As we got older, we somehow developed the sense that this was not permissible.  We started only doing the things we’d been told we were good at: only a few people got involved in the school play, and only the trained musicians got to sing or play instruments.

The world of adulthood seems even more divided: we each have a job to do, and we only paint or perform if there’s a chance someone else will judge us to be good.  It sometimes feels to me as though we all took it a bit too seriously when, as children, we decided that we were going to be astronauts, or policemen, or teachers, or train drivers.  Although most of us ended up calling ourselves Intelligence Consultants, Support Executives, Systems Administrators, Development Specialists and other such nonsense, it’s the same idea: we’ve all got our labels.

A while ago, I wrote about my desire to see ordinary people perform: “I’ve been thinking for a long time about how we can get so-called ‘ordinary people’ (by which I mean people that haven’t set themselves up as performers) to share their innate ability to entertain.”

Recently I found a perfect example: a brilliant feat of storytelling by someone who never claimed to be a storyteller.  It’s called ‘No Escape’, and you can read it here.  (It’s a 12-page PDF, and I think it’s worth reading).