From the category archives:
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 [...]
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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, [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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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