Think about and discuss how the need to tell a story has, or might influence, the way you would write your autobiography.

How often it is we surmise, that life is like fiction – if not more exciting? We could see comedy and tragedy is everything as we choose. We read what we see as much as the reader will see what we write. 

We are familiar with Barthes or Foucault’s ideas like the death of the author, and what difference does it make who is the author? When writing one considers what is seen and the words selected to describe it.

An autobiography being a story about my life, can’t escape how I see and understand the world. The sums of my readings, experiences, environment and etcetera will have an influence on my story just as Judith Fishman noted that a story is a selection, interpretation or restructuring of events and evaluation of it, a fundamental means of ordering and understanding (1981).

We reconstruct our known past through the filter of our present insights.

To ask the question of what events would I change for the sake of a good story in my autobiography, is like asking how much would I distort my life story? If it were only elements of my life, that I think is worth a story, would it be better to write a fiction based on my life?

A favorite author of mine during my adolescence period, Nick Hornby had taken this path with his novels Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About a Boy. In the novel there are autobiographical patterns: the protagonist is a man in his thirties with an encyclopedic knowledge of adolescent things from football and music records. Is a book deal about a fictional know it all, art teacher that is scared to actually become an artist in the pipeline?

In writing my autobiography I would need to balance between the facts of what, where, when, how and at the same time holds the readers with the sort of visual imagery that Van Gogh’s had in his letters and the lyrical way that fictions are written. This is as far as I would go to make a good story, that is by giving it a flowing narrative voice rather than change the events in the story.

I would like to end this week’s discussion by sharing a quote from the 2001 movie A Knight’s Tale loosely based on the Canterbury Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer. In the movie Chaucer played by the brilliant Paul Bettany being accused of lying replied,

                  Yes… Yes… I lied… I am a writer!  I give the truth scope! (2001).