“It is true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.”                        —George Orwell “Why I Write” (1947)

Several months ago (23 September 2024) Miles Fowler wrote a Street Talk blog titled “The Thinly Disguised Autobiography” which provoked me to reflect on this “courageous or foolhardy” activity. Naturally, many writers entertain the notion of writing about themselves; personal experience being a writer’s primary resource.

Autobiography differs from biography in that the author is still alive! I say this flippantly as biography can be of a person alive or dead. It is written by a person other than the subject, however, and is a ‘complete’ life: birth through death or up to a specific ‘present.’ It can explore antecedents and/or context of the birth and at the other end, so to speak, can include influence/repercussions after the demise of the biographed.

As for autobiography, Benjamin Franklin wrote over a period of years, beginning around age sixty-five, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Other well-known autobiographies are by Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (age forty-one, 1969), The Education of Henry Adams (age 69, published age eighty, 1918), Becoming by Michelle Obama (2018 at age sixty), and Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures (age forty-eight; 1995). One close to me is An Interested Life by my brother-in-law, Earl C. Dudley, Jr., a Japanese internment camp survivor and distinguished lawyer and law professor.

Straight-out biographies are too numerous to mention; addressing political, historical persons, sports and film stars, scientists, explorers, inventors, artists, mass murderers and the lesser known which often are intriguingly interesting. For example, A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time: Julia Wilbur’s Struggle for Purpose by Paula Tarnapol Whitacre which concerns a distant Wilbur relation who, in the 1860s, aided recently escaped slaves and who became involved in the women’s suffrage movement: Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony being acquaintances.

Many literary works categorized as fiction are, in fact, thinly disguised autobiographies. This is the question Fowler addresses in his blog. Such examples might be Typee and Oomo by Herman Melville as some critics were skeptical of the facts presented, thinking them made up, Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, A Farewell to Arms by Earnest Hemmingway, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee to name a few.

This ‘blending’ of fact and fiction brings us to a lot of semantic and philosophical double guessing. How truthful/objective can an autobiography be? What is left out, what is ‘embellished?’ Most of us have an ‘image’ of ourselves which, of course, can be an illusion. We can fool ourselves, be dishonest, aspire beyond our abilities, or be influenced by external factors of social milieus. The tendency is to present one’s self in an ‘acceptable’ light so how do we trust the writer? To answer this question, one has to understand the intention of the work and to decide if the internal logic makes sense. Is there balance between ambition and regret, between confession and instruction or an effort to “efface one’s own personality?”

There are many gradations of autobiography with terms such as remembrances/reminiscences, memoirs, diaries, and journals with over-lapping and with nuanced differences. How would you label Walden; or Life in the Woods? Journal, memoir, scientific treatise, philosophical essay? Famous diaries include those of Samuel Pepys, Anne Frank, Henry James, Antonio Pigafetta (of Magellan’s circumnavigation), Robert Falcon Scott’s South Pole expedition, Virginia Wolfe and Anaïs Nin. Memoirs tend to be of a specific period or incident in the writer’s life. Different from the diary, memoir can concern a single incident or some situation over many years.

I have recently read The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen in which he explores the idea that the notebook arose from the invention of and availability of paper which, unlike parchment, could be easily made, written on and convenient enough to be carried around. Keeping financial accounts in the twelfth century simultaneously with the development of double-entry bookkeeping seems to have been the first use of notebooks. Over time they were adapted for many purposes among which were collections of miscellaneous information (zibaldoni in Italian): saving extracts of poems and homilies, preserving quotations, business records, weather conditions and so on. They were also design books or sketch-books: just think Leonard Da Vinci. Later notebooks became personal observation books, of introspection and social comment and, naturally, primary resources for autobiography.

It would be quite rare that one could just sit down and record everything worthy of autobiography strictly from memory (though Proust admirably tried to). I suppose you could research your life via government records, family legal papers, interviews with parents, and grandparents, business associates and friends. I dare say, however, that successful autobiographers are list makers, compulsive recorders, diarists, essayists, historians, genealogists, maybe even hoarders of such things.

Though I do not consider my life extraordinary, it has been a fortunate and perhaps, a lucky one. At age seventeen, I started a journal a la Henry David Thoreau beginning 6 May 1964. Sometime during my academic life, I began using spiral notebooks to collect vocabulary, quotations, and other odd bits of information. I saved magazine and scientific articles in three-ring notebooks. I also have kept  ‘doodle-books’ of poetic phrases for years. Having my own craft business for over thirty-five years, prodigious records were naturally generated. Since 1994, I have kept a record of my hikes on local trails, mostly observations of nature: weather, plants, and occasionally philosophical questions or poetic phrases.

My mother, somewhat of a collector, assembled a scrapbook for my life: baby announcements, adolescent art, Boy Scout achievements, letters home, school band photo, newspaper clippings of various minor accomplishments, and so on. I am indeed thankful that I have inherited complete genealogical records for both sides of my family since coming to America in the 1630s. But what does an autobiography accomplish?

All this primary material for ‘a life’ I’ll probably never write. (as Miles Fowler also concludes). I justify this lack of stick-to-itiveness by saying that my poetry, essays, and books will be my legacy (as well as children and grandchildren!) Just living 10,000 hours doesn’t entitle you to claim mastery over your life. Besides I owe much of my ‘success,’ and happiness to others: especially my wife, companion, confident and friend of fifty-five plus years. Why labor to write a modest, essentially unexciting tale which I simply can’t bring myself to fictionalize? I am not going to be foolish enough to compete with the egos of influencers on Instagram or TIK-TOK. I wonder how enduring such things will be.

I think it is satisfying to be anonymous: I have not wasted my life.

Frederick Wilbur received his BA from the University of Virginia and an MA from the University of Vermont. He has authored three books on architectural and decorative woodcarving. His two poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps. His work has appeared in many print and on-line reviews including Shenandoah, The Atlanta Review, The Comstock Review, The Dalhousie Review, Rise Up Review, and Mojave River Review. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Award by Midwest Quarterly (2017).