From the category archives:

Life Writing

My obituary

October 2, 2008

One of the 10 auto/biographies I’d like to write is “an obituary for every year of my life, imagining I’d died in that year.” I first thought of the idea of writing my own obituary about five years ago, shortly after I discovered the Oxford Muse and started to think seriously about serial autobiography. [I've [...]

10 auto/biographies I’d like to write

September 29, 2008

The Library of Unwritten Books houses “a collection of possible books” – hundreds of titles of books that haven’t been written yet. Here’s another list of unwritten books. I’m a prolific inventor of new books, and I only wish the execution were half as prolific. Here are 10 auto/biographies I’d love to write, some time. [...]

The story of the memory

September 1, 2008

When we tell our autobiographies, are we telling the story of the event itself, or the story of our remembering it? I’ve come to realise that memory is part invention: by making sense of the disconnected vestiges of our past, we turn them into something else, a new narrative that creates as much as it [...]

Thank you, James Frey

August 9, 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 were fabricated. The Smoking Gun’s telling of [...]

The cult of the self

April 14, 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 to write solely using [...]

What is the story of your life?

April 11, 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 perhaps more important [...]

Biographers, Lewis Carroll and naming

August 22, 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 his pseudonym. To start with, [...]

Autobiography as History?

July 16, 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 exercise of memory, rather [...]

Goodbye, Mr Ben

July 15, 2007

I will start this story in the present: some of my friends still call me ‘Mr Ben’. It has served me well as a pseudonym for approximately nine years, having first come into use when I felt in need of an Internet alias. Many embrace the online world for its anonymity, and this certainly is [...]

The themed autobiography

June 5, 2007

There are various ways to escape the mundanity of a strictly chronological account of your life story. One way is to compose Autobiographical Memories, which are 100-word snapshots of a specific memory, focussing on vivid emotions and sense experience. Another compelling way of telling one’s life story is through what I call the filtered, or [...]

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