Writing Autobiography: Some Thoughts.....as a retired English teacher after 35 years in classrooms I post the following thoughts. Writing autobiography is something students do all the time in English classes, although they often don't know it. Thisessay may be too long for some readers and I advise that, when your eyes start to glaze over, just stop reading...that's what I do and I do it often because there is so much to read and you can't read it all...run with your interests.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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ESSAY ON AUTOBIOGRAPHY MAY 2005
In 1995 I wrote my first essay on the nature of autobiography. It was some two years after completing the first edition of my own autobiography, a work which had taken me eight years to write(1984-1993). I am now working on the 6th edition of that autobiography more than twenty-five years after the inception of this project in 1984. I trust this 6th edition will be the final one, but only time will tell. I was overwhelmed for many years by a sense of the complexity of the task, by feelings of indifference for the process of putting my life story on paper and by a vision of the magnitude of the task at hand if it was to be of any relevance to readers as well as, in some ways more importantly, to me. I struggled to find an authentic, inspired response, voice, for my words, for the phrasing, yes, for my voice as it is often said. This struggle to achieve the right feeling in my writing life, something we all have to do in our daily lives, was—as I look back now—an essential prerequisite for this autobiographical enterprize.
For ten years, from 1993 to 2003 I lost a sense of direction in writing my autobiography and was unable to move beyond that first edition which I had found, as I said, very unsatisfactory. During these same ten years, though, I read about autobiography and after reading studies of process and method, of philosophy and psychology, of the sociology and literary problems in autobiography, I was able to write a cohesive and, for me anyway, stimulating second edition. I certainly hope that this work will become of practical use to my fellow-man in the decades and even centuries ahead. Vision creates reality, as one of my co-religionists once said. This idea of the future relevance of my work seems presumptuous and this sense of my presumptuousness at first militated against the pursuit of the goals I began with when I set out to write this autobiography in 1984. But I pursued these goals anyway and that emotional and intellectual problem, hurdle, was overcome, at least for the most part.
Since I found the study of autobiography more interesting that the writing of it in the years 1993 to 2003, I wrote a series of essays on the nature of autobiography during those years. This is the first in that series. I also revised those essays in the next decade: 2003-2013. What follows in this first essay are a few general comments on autobiography with the long range aim of drawing these ideas together into some meaningful whole in future essays.
Even as a retired person with far fewer responsibilities on my plate than during my forty years of employment(1961-2001) and student life(1949-1989), my day-to-day life still takes me into corners of activity that keep me away from the kind of academic pursuits that this brief essay involves. My class in creative writing at a local Seniors School, my last years as a volunteer-teacher and a radio program that I ran for the LSA of Launceston kept me busy until 2003 and 2005. My wife's illness over many years, my singing work, family duties and obligations of home and hearth however minimal, a necessary amount of physical activity to keep a sound mind in a sound body, fatigue in the evening after more than eight hours of reading and writing and an endless assortment of odds and ends have kept me from continuing this simple task. But the concentration, the focus, has been improving as the years of my late adulthood(60-80) have entered their middle half(65-75).
But, by 2005, I was able to free myself from virtually all of these encumbrances, except those necessary to maintain my physical existence in a home. The years 1999 to 2005 became, then, a second stage, a transition stage, before an even fuller retirement at the age of 60 from the demands of social, employment and community life. After years, decades, of being up-front in classrooms and in Bahá'í community life, of being a person who wanted to give talks in Bahá'í communities and who wanted to excel as a teacher, I became, by degrees into my late fifties and sixties, what we used to call a "back-room boy", beavering away to as great an effect as possible but with little personal fanfare.
Not that I was shy or retiring when it came to advocating a new project. I could be both vociferous and voracious; but it was just that I preferred my writing to speak for itself, to be the vehicle for my energy and voraciousness. I pursued my various missions with a determination which almost always saw results. But they became results on the internet measured in nanoseconds and spread across thousands of sites. In the Baha’i community quantitative results had been slow for decades and they were still slow.
Errors, omissions, even lies, are part of the fiction or imposture that is autobiography, so went one of the main trains of thought in the literature on autobiography. The creative writer turns to autobiography out of some creative longing that can not be satisfied through fiction, but it is impossible to avoid various kinds of inaccuracies. Some autobiographers find a peculiar closeness and intensity of effect as they write. That was certainly true of me. But it is difficult in writing autobiography to keep history and fiction distinct. Nabokov says that the tracing of images of one’s personal life into intricate harmonies is what autobiography does. In the process hard edges of facticity rub off. Writers try to repossess the realities of their past from what often appears to be a sterile and even fictive world, try to repossess that past to which they have often sacrificed themselves, lived their days or, if lucky, lost themselves in literature, in life, in living, as if in some perpetual orgy, as the writer Flaubert put it in one of his letters.
The historicographical transaction that is autobiography does not contain the total freedom or imaginative response of, say, poetry or fiction. Unreliability is, still, an inescapable condition of autobiography given the play of freedom and imagination that is involved. The reader can watch the writer wrestle with truth but only to a degree because, for the most part, the reader does not know what the truth is. Readers must rely on the autobiographers and their version of the truth of their lives.
It is important for the critic to understand the organizing principle or purpose behind the work of an autobiographer. For the conscious shaping of a life, an informing purpose, principle, context, must exist behind the work. A voyage of genuine self-discovery is an essential component of such a work for the writer. It certainly was for me; it enabled me to rise from the ashes of a dried-out first edition, an edition I could well have thrown away. But in the second edition of my memoirs my literary voyage began to take place in a narrative past juxtaposed with a dramatic present. Confession, apology and memoir came to exist side by side as various contradictory and often unstable selves battled it out. This battle ground was part of the very fertility and the freshness that resurrected that first edition.
These are just some of the ideas I wanted to put down as part of this series of essays on the autobiographical process. They are just some of an array of writing which has appeared in the literature on autobiographical writing especially since the decade 1950 to 1960 when my Bahá'í pioneering-travelling life began in earnest. I summarize much of my reading in these essays for those with an interest in the process, the exercise, of writing autobiography. I hope a few here on the internet find my words of some value to them, if not in their own effort to write their autobiography, at least as part of their general interest inventory.
Ron Price
First written on 5 May 2005 and updated/edited occasionally until 27/8/09 (1350 words)
Writing Autobiography: Some Thoughts 
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