Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives

by Sidonie Smith

Autobiographical writing is redefining the meaning of narrative, as the recent explosion of memoirs by writers such as Frank McCourt, Mary Karr, Dave Eggers, and Kathryn Harrison suggests. But what’s involved in bringing these narratives into the classroom—in creative writing, cultural studies, women’s and ethnic studies, and social science and literature courses? How may instructors engage the philosophical, historical, social, and theoretical contexts of the emerging field of autobiography studies?Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, two authorities in life narrative studies distill their diverse forays into life writing in a concise yet far-reaching overview of key terms, issues, histories, and texts in autobiography studies. Reading Autobiography is a step-by-step introduction to the differences of self-narrative from fiction and biography; the components of autobiographical acts; such core concepts as memory, experience, identity, agency, and the body; the textual and critical history of the field; and prospects for future research. Organized as a user-friendly handbook, it includes a glossary of key words, suggestions for teaching, and extensive primary and secondary bibliographies. Sidonie Smith is professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Michigan. Julia Watson is associate professor of comparative studies at Ohio State University.

Genres: Nonfiction, Academic, Memoir, Writing, Research, Theory, Grad School

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Sidonie Smith is the Martha Guernsey Colby Collegiate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan.

Reviews

[Jessica J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote my master's thesis on how gender is represented in contemporary memoirs written by women. I could not have written it without this book - comprehensive, readable, and full of detailed examples. Not for the layman by any means, but if literary theory as it applies to self-writing is of interest to you, this is an excellent place to start!

[Katrina Sark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapter 1 – Life Narrative: Definitions and Distinctions
p.1 – In Greek, autos signifies “self,” bios “life,” and graphe “writing.” Taken together in this order, the words denote “self life writing,” a brief definition of “autobiography.”
p.2 – The term autobiography was first coined in the preface to a collection of poems by the eightieth-century English working-class writer Ann Yearsley, although most critics cite Robert Southey’s anglicizing of the three Greek words in 1809 as the first use of the term in English.
Until the twentieth century the word memoirs (French les memoirs) was commonly used to designate “self life writing.”
In earlier centuries, terms such as “memoir” (Madame de Staël, Glückel of Hameln), or “confessions” (Augustine, Rousseau), or “essays” (Montaigne) were used to mark the writer’s refraction of self-reference though speculations about history, politics, religion, science, and culture.
p.3 – Autobiography is a term for a particular practice of life narrative that emerged in the Enlightenment and has become canonical in the West.
p.4 – In biography, scholars of other people’s lives document and interpret those lives from a point of view external to the subject. In life narrative people write about their own lives (even when they write about themselves in the second or third person, or as a member of a community) and do so simultaneously from externalized and internal points of view.
p.6 – In autobiographical narratives, imaginative acts of remembering always intersect with such rhetorical acts as assertion, justification, judgment, conviction, and interrogation. That is, life narrators address readers whom they want to persuade of their version of experience.
p.7-8 – In the nineteenth century many novels were presented as autobiographical narratives, the life stories of fictional characters. Think of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. The narrators of these texts employ the intimate first-person voice as protagonists confiding their personal histories and trying to understand how their past lives have made them who they are.
p.8 – Many twentieth-century novels are also narrated as fist-person autobiographies, for example, Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, and Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother. And the great novels of Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and Robert Musil invoke tropes of autobiographical narration.
Chapter 2 – Autobiographical Subjects
p.15 – “You are of course never yourself.” (Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography)
p.21 – Memory and Trauma – In life narratives of the Holocaust, sexual abuse, torture, AIDS, and disability, among others, narrators struggle to find ways of telling about suffering that defies language and understanding; they struggle to reassemble memoirs so dreadful they must be repressed for human beings to survive and function in life. In such narratives, the problem of recalling and recreating a past life involves organizing the inescapable but often disabling force of memory and negotiating its fragmentary intrusions with increasing, if partial, understanding.
p.22 – In her ten-part autobiographical poem A Poem Without a Hero, for instance, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova narrates her husband and son’s arrest during 1935-40 (the four years of Stalin’s regime of terror) and links her son’s imprisonment to the larger tragedy of state-sponsored murder. The subjective “I” breaks down midway through the cycle as she confesses her struggle between the pain of memory and the forgetting offered by madness. Negotiating this break, the narrator moves toward a transpersonal identification with those who suffered. Its testimony to political trauma in both her family and the state makes A Poem Without A Hero an autobiographical poem that is also a call to collective Russian conscience.
For Holocaust survivors such as Charlotte Delbo in Auschwitz and After, Elie Wiesel in Night, and Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, the struggle with memories of the Holocaust necessitates the return again and again to those incomprehensible moments in the past. Levi struggles to exorcise memories of a regime of living whose logic destroyed all the bases of humanities, including the metaphorical and literal dimensions of language itself.
p.29 – Or consider the case of a slave narrative such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself by Harriet A. Jacobs, published in 1861. Defenders of slavery were fiercely invested in debunking the authenticity of narratives about life in the slave system. And certain conventions of slave narratives provided grounds for alleging that these stories were fictionalized. Fugitive or former slaves often gave fictional names to the people in their narratives to maintain secrecy about escapes and to protect people left behind.
p.31 – The case of Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas offers a more extreme case of the issue of who claims the authority to tell the story of a loved one. In in Stein writes in the voice of her lifelong lover and friend Alice, but primarily in celebration of the brilliance and accomplishment of Stein and their expatriate circle in Paris of the 1920s and 30s. Some critics have suggested that this might be a fraudulent act, an act of ventriloquism of Alice’s voice.
p.41 – In memoirs of living and dying with AIDS, David Wojnarowicz, Harold Brodkey, and Paul Monette explore the conjunction of desire, danger, and disease in the male body at a time of moral panic produced about the AIDS pandemic. In Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, Wojnarowicz refuses the fixed cultural identities of “queer” or “gay man” as he writes “close” to the body and its desires. Immersed in the visuality of memory, Wojnarowicz recreates the specificity of desire and embodiedness as an “I” who has always “lived with the sensation of being an observer of my own life as it occurs” (149). And it is this distance, this imagination of observing himself, that the photographer taps to recreate sensory experience. He does so in order to counter cultural practices that render invisible “any kind of sexual imagery other than straight white male erotic fantasies” (119). These and other narratives of bodily centered crisis and trauma underscore the centrality of embodiment to the telling of lives.
Chapter 3 – Autobiographical Acts
p.51 – In political speeches candidates often tell compelling personal narratives that may project “character” and “values” or situate them in the major wars and movements of the times or attach them to specific religious, ethnic, or vocational communities.
p.65 – A relational narrative of a different sort is at the center of Paul Monette’s life narrative, On Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. The partner of Roger Horwitz, a gay man who died of AIDS, Monette remembers a partner and a relationship in a text that, as Couser notes, blurs the line between auto- and biography. Monette struggles to narrate several stories simultaneously – a chronological journal of illness and death, a romantic love story that contests popular representations of gay men, an AIDS story of cultural crisis in the gay community, and a narrative of rereading and revising a crisis in the gay community, and a narrative of rereading and revising a journal’s gaps and emotions. Monette’s second memoir, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story is a prequel of his life that ends with meeting Horwitz and realizing that his previous life, alone and in the closet, was one of being “bodiless” and “frozen” without a life. While family members, spouses, or lovers are not always the focus f narratives of significant others, they are understandably prominent forms of deeply felt relationship.
p.67 – In The Lover, Marguerite Duras’ narrator shifts between the confessional mode of first-personal narrative and the novelistic mode of third-person narrative. Here the narrator exploits the otherness of her identity as a young white woman in colonial Indochina to undermine the stability of a colonizer and a colonized “I.”
p.70 – In The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin produces self-knowledge through his “Project of arriving at Moral Perfection.”
Chapter 4 – Life Narrative in Historical Perspective
p.85 – The lyric poems of Sappho of Lesbos (c. 600 BCE) present the voices of a woman candidly exploring her emotions and the somatic designs of love and physical desire, often with self-mocking wit, as feminist scholars have recently argued.
The “first” book-length autobiographical narrative in the West is generally acknowledged to be the Confessions of St. Augustine, written around 397 CE. Augustine’s “I” retrospectively views his early life from the perspective of his conversion to Christianity. Saved, he looks back to access the workings of grace in his wayward life and the steps to his spiritual salvation.
In the next thousand years, most autobiographical writing was done by religious men and women as a form of devotion in the service of spiritual examination.
p.99 – In the Romantic quest narrative, the autobiographical becomes an allegorical pursuit of an ideals or transcendent self desiring to merge with some “absolute” of nature, love, or intellect that is beyond the ego, that is sublime. The legacy of Rousseau’s radical individualism was reshaped by Goethe in The Sorrows of Young Werther, an epistolary fictionalized life narrative of self-preoccupation to the point of suicide. Werther powerfully influenced the artistic self-portrayal of passionate obsession.
p.102 – The Bildungsroman narrates the formation of a young life as gendered, classed, and raced within a social network larger than the family or the religious community. But, as feminist scholars note, gendered norms differ for women, who historically have not chosen, but been chosen (or not); who are not initiated into social life, but retreat from participation; who awaken more to limitations than possibility. For women life narrators, then, the Bildungsroman’s model was inverted.
The structure of the Bildungsroman is also implicit in many nineteenth-century slave narratives. Ex- slaves found a powerful rhetorical means of intervening in the repressive institution of slavery by telling or writing their narratives of enslavement, self-education, and quest for entry into the free society of American citizens. They at once testified to the circumstances of their degradation and the achievement of status as full human beings. The slave narrative became one of the most popular forms in the United States and Europe.
The most widely read of these now are Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglas and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs.
p.107 – Immigrant narratives and narratives of exile become sites through which formerly marginal or displaced subjects explore the terms of their cultural identities and their diasporic allegiances.
The Bildungsroman continues to be a decisive model for the presentation of twentieth-century lives, for postcolonial writers who cast their narratives in terms of encounters with powerful mentors at cultural crossroads of metropole and colony and of conflicting concepts of education and social value.
p.108 – Postmodern narratives undermine the foundations upon which identity is posited by shifting the ground of reference and explode the relationship of individual memory to any certain chronology of experience.
AIDS narratives entwine memoirs of caring and loving with arguments for the de-stigmatization of the disease, thereby intervening in national and international debates about how to signify and respond to the pandemic.
Coming-out narratives make visible formerly invisible subjects, as gay, bisexual, lesbian, and transgendered subjects inscribe stories of the costs of passing as heteronormative subjects and the liberatory possibilities of legitimation
Chapter 5 – A History of Autobiography Criticism
p.121 – Some of the life narratives that emerged as “landmarks” in the critical study of self-exploration, confession, and self-discovery will be familiar, for example, St. Augustine’s Confessions, Cellini’s Life, Rousseau’s Confessions, Franklin’s Autobiography, Goethe’s Truth and Poetry, and Thoreau’s Walden.
Appendix A – Fifty-two Genres of Life Narratives
p.183 – Apology – a form of self-presentation as self-defense against the allegations or attacks of others, an apology justifies one’s own deeds, beliefs, and way of life.
p.188 – Autothanatography – autobiographical texts that confront illness and death by performing a life at a limit of its own, or another’s undoing.
AIDS-related autothanatography confronts death head on: “Death writing becomes preeminently life writing, and a bid to take charge of how that life writing is read.” (Susanna Egan, 207). It is “part of a complex claiming of agency” that attempts to connect the organic to the symbolic (208).
p.189 – Bildungsroman – novel of development and social formation of a young man, as in Dicken’s Great Expectations.
p.190 – Case Study – life narrative that is gathered into a dossier in order to make a diagnosis and identification of a disease or disorder. This mode of life-reporting is often associated with Freud’s extended analyses of the cases of various patients with symptoms such as hysteria and gender-identity disorder.
p.191 – Chronicle – a form used in classical, medieval, Renaissance, and modern times involving a first-hand account of the history of one’s time, and often incorporating earlier histories. The chronicle is connected as a loosely linked series of encounters and exploits.
p.192 – Confession – An oral or written narrative, the confession is addressed to an interlocutor who listens, judges, and has the power to absolve. Confession was originally doubly addressed, to God and to a confessor. Since Augustine’s narrative, the double address of the confession had been directed to God and the human reader who needs a narrative explanation of sinfulness and redemption.
p.193 – Diary – a form of periodic life writing, the diary records dailiness in accounts and observations of emotional responses.
p.195 – Genealogy – a method for charting family history, genealogy locates, charts, and authenticates identity by constructing a family tree of descent. Its key concept is the “pedigree” of ancestral evidence based on documents and generational history and verified though fixed protocols, such as trees and charts.
p.196 – Journal – a form of life writing that records events and occurrences, as in Daniel Dafoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Some critics distinguish diary from journal by characterizing the journal as a chronicle of public record that is less intimate than the diary.
Letters – a mode of directed, and dated, correspondence with a specific addressee and signatory, letters seem to be private writings, but in the late eighteenth century they began to be understood as both private correspondence expressing the inner feelings of the writing subject and as public documents to be shared within a literary circle.
p.197 – Life writing – an overarching term used for a variety of nonfictional modes of writing that claim to engage the shaping of someone’s life. The writing of one’s own life is autobiographical, the writing of another’s biographical; but that boundary is sometimes permeable.
Life narrative – a term distinguishing the writing of one’s own life from that of another’s. Our understanding of the acts and practices of narrating one’s life, which calls into question a narrowed definition associated with what we’ve termed canonical or traditional autobiography.
Meditation – a prominent form of self-reflexive writing during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to Louis Lohr Martz, the “meditation” is a rigorous exercise in self-contemplation whose aim “is the state of devotion.” In literary form, its emphasis is on “a process of the mind rather than a particular subject-matter” as the narrator seeks “the work of special grace.” The history of self-reflexive meditation in nonfictional prose can be traced through Montaigne’s Essays, Donne’s sermons, Pascal’s Pensés, Thoreau’s Walden and Yates’ A Vision.
p.198 – Memoir – life narrative that historically situates the subject in a social environment, as either observer or participant; the memoir directs attention more toward the lives and actions of other than to the narrator.
Oral History – in this technique for gathering a story, an interviewer listens to, records, shapes, and edits the life story of another. In oral history the one who speaks is not the one who writes, and the one who writes is often an absent presence in the text who nonetheless controls its narrative. Oral history is then a mediated form of personal narrative that depends on an interviewer who intervenes to collect and assemble a version of the stories that are situated and changing.
p.200 – Personal Essay – a mode of writing that is literally a self-trying-out, the personal essay is a testing (“assay”) of one’s own intellectual, emotional, and physiological responses to a given topic. Since its development by Montaigne as a form of self-exploration engaging received wisdom, the essay has been a site of self-creation through giving one’s perspective on the thoughts of others.
Poetic Autobiography – a mode of the lyric distinguished, according to James Olney, not by content but by “the formal device of recapitulation and recall” (“Some Versions of Memory”), such as T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Paul Valéry’s The Young Fate.
p.204 – Slave Narrative – a mode of life narrative written by a fugitive or freed ex-slave about captivity, oppression – physical, economic, and emotional – and escape from bondage into some form of “freedom.” In the US slave narratives were usually antebellum (published before the Civil War), though the dates of enslavement differ in different nations, and some narratives are published well into the twentieth century (The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, the life narrative of Esteban Montejo, enslaved in Cuba, as told by Miguel Barnet, was first published in Spanish in 1966).
Because the ability of ex-slaves to become literate was often contested, several narratives were denounced as inauthentic, for example, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (later shown by Jean Fagan Yellin to have been authored by Jacobs under the pseudonym Linda Brent). The narratives of ex-slaves importantly challenge myths of the slave system promulgated in the plantation culture of Southern literature and history.
p.205 – Survivor Narrative – narratives of survivors of traumatic, abusive, or genocidal experience.
p.206 – Trauma Narrative – a mode of writing the unspeakable.
p.207 – Travel Narrative – travelogue, travel journal, adventure narrative, quest, letter home, narrative of exotic escape.
Appendix B – Group and Classroom Projects
p.211 – In a discussion group, develop a set of questions to be asked in oral interviews around a particular aspect of life experience. Examples might include the following: becoming an American, being a young girl in different decades, rewards and conflicts of professional identity, familial versus regional versus national identities, being a medical patient, attitudes toward the body. Interview one or more people about this topic, then write up the oral interview. Attach to it a critique that explores the process of doing the interview and developing the essay. Try to reflect on what issues are involved in one person soliciting and editing another person’s life narrative.
p.212 – Make a list of life narratives you’re read. What famous people do you know about through their autobiograph

[Mert · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5 Stars (%62/100)

I've used this book as a textbook in my Life Writing master class. I think it is a very good source especially if you are new to this area of literature. Before reading the book and taking the course, I had no idea what life writing was. It is also very ironic that Smith, despite arguing that we should call it life writing or life narratives, chose the word autobiography for the title. Overall, it is a useful book and a good source to cite certain things. However, I found it complicated at times and it is quite long. I still recommend it if you are interested in memoirs and autobiographies, sorry I mean life narratives. My favorite term from the book is "thanatography" which comes from the Greek God of Death Thanatos and means narratives that deal with one's experience with death.

[Shirin A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

An essential text to approach autobiographical texts. Incredibly thorough on theory and criticism, albeit a little repetitive in some places. In spite of it being a treasure trove of information, it often feels too wordy and reads like an overwritten academic text - which I can partly forgive on the basis of the fact that dealing with complex concepts is no easy task. I will certainly return to this guide soon enough.

[StrangeBedfellows · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a good resource for anyone new to autobiographies, particular for classes. It informs on autobiographical writings, instructs on how to read autobiographies, and even contains exercises for better understanding. Of course, it definitely has that textbook 'feel', so it's not the kind of book you would read for personal enjoyment.

[Pinar G · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for my History Master's class. Too much reference to scholary stuff. Luckily there is a tool kit at the end

[Andrea Cruz]

This was an assigned text for one of my graduate seminars. I enjoyed the dissection of each formula of autobiography. I find it truly fascinating how we as readers don’t consider the different components involving tone, addressee, intention, visual images, geographical location, content, etc and how it impacts one’s life narrative along with our experience in reading. All of these aspects really formulate our perception and understanding of someone’s life based on a controlled/uncontrolled setting.

[Mila Menna · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 I did think this book was good overall. There were parts that I would consider pretty obvious conclusions about autobiography that I already knew. It’s really theory heavy and sometimes too convoluted when parts could easily be summarized in a more accessible, understandable way. Overall though, I’m glad I read it and I feel like it’s a must read for anyone teaching, into creative writing, or interested in English.

[WallofText · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is by no means a perfect book but it offers a lot of interesting and valuable information. There are a number of repetitions, the language isn’t the most accessible, it’s wordy and at times really outdated, but the structure is really well done and I learned a lot about life writing.

A new edition could do a lot of good for this book especially to start using they more consistently throughout and to refer to polyamory as such and not as bisexuality which is something completely unrelated.

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fine for what I needed to get out of it for a class, but dry as hell.

[Alma Castro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent resource on how to analyze autobiography and memoir.

[Joule · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Western autobiographies and criticism (Chapter 5 & 6). Very useful and informative for me (bachelor's level).

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super useful for my thesis on autobiography in relation to obesity.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic resource for teaching autobiographies.

[Eszter Szép · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a good summary of what has recently happened in the study of autobiography. I really appreciate the two chapters that were not part of the first edition, they open up the book and the authors' concept of autobiography to other media, visuality, comics, virtual stuff, and performance.

[Silke Meyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

excellent intro into the genre - even if it is 20 years old. great for classroom preparation, general knowledge about the field and lots of info about things you might also use for the understanding of literature generally.

[Liesa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Useful book for my master dissertation; well written.

[Joanna Eleftheriou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just got this in the mail. Looks excellent. If I were to teach a course on memoir/autobiography, I'd use this--just enough theory for an upperclass undergrad, and well written.

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is repetitive to a fault and somewhat obvious. It does bring up very interesting and unique ideas, but it doesn't grasp the readers.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A useful starting point for reading autobiography...especially the toolkit in the final pages.

[Joe Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good overview. Too much academia jargon.