Nowadays autobiographies are more fiction than fact

We readily accept the presence of autobiographical elements infiction and any reader with an interest in the life of an author takespleasure in identifying them. But the existence of fiction inautobiography tends to make the reader uneasy. We instinctively feelthat autobiography should be far from fiction.

But we dont live stories. While writing autobiographical texts we arerelying on the vantage point of the present. So no wonder that theremight be something blatantly fictional about the tales we recount aboutthe past. We are remembering selectively. We tend to keep in mind onlygood things about ourselves the impression we made when entering theparty room all dressed up in frenzii denim leggings, our brilliantretorts, ready wit, and other achievements.

Recollections aresubject to distortions and falsifications. Telling of a life history isnot simply recollecting experience as it was. The outcome is animaginative or even imaginary story we tell. There is an endlessdebate about the definition of autobiography and the boundaries of factand fiction. It reflects a fundamental uncertainty about the relationbetween autobiographical narrative and the life it is supposed torecord.

It is sometimes impossible to separate the factualcontent of autobiography from its narrative matrix. Autobiographies arequite often indistinguishable from novels. The authors themselvesperform as artists and historians at the same time mixing fact withfiction and reality with imagination. Their lapses from fidelity toautobiographical truth into the manipulations of fiction generateliterary constructions of what they have been or are, conferringinterpretations on experience that did not posses those meanings at thetime of occurrence.

Therefore autobiographical texts, in so faras they aim toward an enlarged understanding of the past by revisingand correcting it, cannot be judged by either precision of theirdetail or correspondence to what was. So it is no longer the basis infact that separates autobiography from narrative fiction. The authorsintention has become a decisive criterion in the identification of agiven text as an autobiography.

The decision of an author toadopt an autobiographical viewpoint corresponds to the reasons for theinvention of autobiography. What motivates any individual to the workof self-construction is to affirm the existence of the self as theinitiating cause, to take on the role of a creative maker. It is alsomost human to reflect comprehensively on the past, and impose order andcoherence upon it. The act of existing meaningfully in time and makingsense of ourselves and others is only possible through the fabric ofnarrative.

When considering autobiographical texts, texts forwhich the interpreter is at once reader and writer, subject and object,it becomes quite clear that the meanings we arrive at are in some senseas much made as found. The process of autobiographical reflection isfundamentally metaphorical one a new relationship is being createdbetween the past and present, a new creative configuration, designed togive greater form to ones previous and present experience.

Nowadaysthe autobiographical act is a mode of self-invention always practicedfirst in living and only eventually, and occasionally, in writing. Themodern art of self-construction inevitably leaves the self at thecenter of all autobiography to some extent fictive. Fictions andfiction-making process have become a central constituent of the truthof any life as it is lived and of any art devoted to the presentationof that life. Autobiography in our time is increasingly understood asboth an art of memory and an art of imagination where the materials ofthe past are shaped by memory and imagination to serve the needs ofpresent consciousness.