The themed autobiography

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 themed, autobiography.

A themed autobiography is a relational kind of life writing, which tells the story of somebody’s relationship with a person, activity, or thing. So, for example, Francis Spufford’s The Child That Books Built is the story of Spufford’s childhood development, told solely in terms of the books he was reading at the time. It is a startlingly accurate account of the profound impact that reading can have on a person, and in terms of genre it could be described as a cross between autobiography and literary criticism, with a bit of psychology thrown in.

Indeed, relational lives of this kind show an almost universal tendency to cross over into other genres. A similar, but slightly less successful, example of the themed autobiography is Dylan Jones’ iPod, Therefore I Am, which ambitiously attempts to intertwine three separate narratives. The story of Jones’ relationship with the iconic gadget is interspersed with recollections of his life as a music fan, with an underlying comparison drawn between the sleek, ergonomic music players of today’s world, and the slightly more cumbersome (but no less exciting) vinyl records the author grew up collecting. The third narrative is that of the iPod’s manufacturer, Apple, which is interesting but slightly tangential to the genuinely interesting autobiographical details offered.

A popular theme, perhaps because of its almost universal reach, is food. William Leith’s The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict was described by Tim Lott as “part memoir, part diet book, part comedy, and part sugar rush”, thus providing another testimony to the genre-crossing nature of this kind of writing.

I mention all of this because I recently came across a witty, engaging and concise example of the themed autobiography posted on the Newsvine website. ‘Odd Jobs’ tells the story of its author’s various occupations, ranging from “cleaning out the cages in a judge’s ring at a cat show” to working with tourists on Alcatraz. The piece struck me as a particularly good example of how ordinary people might use the themed autobiography to reveal something of themselves to friends and strangers. We have now moved beyond the notion that an autobiography’s job is to reveal some kind of definite truth to its readers: instead, we read life writing to find versions of the truth – or, as I prefer to see it, different stories that can be told. Gone, too, is the idea that an autobiography must capture everything, must tell the whole story. Our postmodern perspective is paving the way for the serial autobiographer, the life writer who will not let things alone, least of all his own, personal narratives. We can tell our stories in a multitude of ways, picking different themes, perspectives or forms each time we do so. The themed autobiography gives us an excellent opportunity to explore these different versions, constantly retelling stories which – I am coming to realise with increasing clarity – will never stay still.

• The sheep-lion
• The story of the memory
• Intrusive narrators

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