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 [...]
From the category archives:
Life Writing
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. [...]
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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 [...]
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In interviews, James Frey has proven his understanding that the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is far more complicated than most people assume.
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 [...]