is a biography narrative

Definition of Biography

Common examples of biographical subjects.

As a literary device, biography is important because it allows readers to learn about someone’s story and history. This can be enlightening, inspiring, and meaningful in creating connections. Here are some common examples of biographical subjects:

Famous Examples of Biographical Works

Difference between biography, autobiography, and memoir, examples of biography in literature, example 1:  savage beauty: the life of edna st. vincent millay  (nancy milford).

One of the first things Vincent explained to Norma was that there was a certain freedom of language in the Village that mustn’t shock her. It wasn’t vulgar. ‘So we sat darning socks on Waverly Place and practiced the use of profanity as we stitched. Needle in, . Needle out, piss. Needle in, . Needle out, c. Until we were easy with the words.’

This passage reflects the way in which Milford is able to characterize St. Vincent Millay as a person interacting with her sister. Even avid readers of a writer’s work are often unaware of the artist’s private and personal natures, separate from their literature and art. Milford reflects the balance required on the part of a literary biographer of telling the writer’s life story without undermining or interfering with the meaning and understanding of the literature produced by the writer. Though biographical information can provide some influence and context for a writer’s literary subjects, style, and choices , there is a distinction between the fictional world created by a writer and the writer’s “real” world. However, a literary biographer can illuminate the writer’s story so that the reader of both the biography and the biographical subject’s literature finds greater meaning and significance.

Example 2:  The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens  (Claire Tomalin)

The season of domestic goodwill and festivity must have posed a problem to all good Victorian family men with more than one family to take care of, particularly when there were two lots of children to receive the demonstrations of paternal love.

Example 3:  Virginia Woolf  (Hermione Lee)

‘A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living’: so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don’t stay still, so life-writing can’t be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of human character is changing. The biographer has to pioneer, going ‘ahead of the rest of us, like the miner’s canary, testing the atmosphere , detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions’. So, ‘There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation’. She is talking about the story of Shelley, but she could be talking about her own life-story.

In this passage, Lee is able to demonstrate what her biographical subject, Virginia Woolf, felt about biography and a person telling their own or another person’s story. Literary biographies of well-known writers can be especially difficult to navigate in that both the author and biographical subject are writers, but completely separate and different people. As referenced in this passage by Lee, Woolf was aware of the subtleties and fluidity present in a person’s life which can be difficult to judiciously and effectively relay to a reader on the part of a biographer. In addition, Woolf offers insight into the fact that biographers must make choices in terms of what information is presented to the reader and the context in which it is offered, making them a “miner’s canary” as to how history will view and remember the biographical subject.

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Biographies: The Stories of Humanity

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A biography is a story of a person's life, written by another author. The writer of a biography is called a biographer while the person written about is known as the subject or biographee.

Biographies usually take the form of a narrative , proceeding chronologically through the stages of a person's life. American author Cynthia Ozick notes in her essay "Justice (Again) to Edith Wharton" that a good biography is like a novel, wherein it believes in the idea of a life as "a triumphal or tragic story with a shape, a story that begins at birth, moves on to a middle part, and ends with the death of the protagonist."

A biographical essay is a comparatively short work of nonfiction  about certain aspects of a person's life. By necessity, this sort of essay  is much more selective than a full-length biography, usually focusing only on key experiences and events in the subject's life.

Between History and Fiction

Perhaps because of this novel-like form, biographies fit squarely between written history and fiction, wherein the author often uses personal flairs and must invent details "filling in the gaps" of the story of a person's life that can't be gleaned from first-hand or available documentation like home movies, photographs, and written accounts.

Some critics of the form argue it does a disservice to both history and fiction, going so far as to call them "unwanted offspring, which has brought a great embarrassment to them both," as Michael Holroyd puts it in his book "Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography." Nabokov even called biographers "psycho-plagiarists," meaning that they steal the psychology of a person and transcribe it to the written form.

Biographies are distinct from creative non-fiction such as memoir in that biographies are specifically about one person's full life story -- from birth to death -- while creative non-fiction is allowed to focus on a variety of subjects, or in the case of memoirs certain aspects of an individual's life.

Writing a Biography

For writers who want to pen another person's life story, there are a few ways to spot potential weaknesses, starting with making sure proper and ample research has been conducted -- pulling resources such as newspaper clippings, other academic publications, and recovered documents and found footage.  

First and foremost, it is the duty of biographers to avoid misrepresenting the subject as well as acknowledging the research sources they used. Writers should, therefore, avoid presenting a personal bias for or against the subject as being objective is key to conveying the person's life story in full detail.

Perhaps because of this, John F. Parker observes in his essay "Writing: Process to Product" that some people find writing a biographical essay "easier than writing an  autobiographical  essay. Often it takes less effort to write about others than to reveal ourselves." In other words, in order to tell the full story, even the bad decisions and scandals have to make the page in order to truly be authentic.

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Literary Devices

Literary devices, terms, and elements, definition of biography, difference between biography and autobiography, common examples of biography, significance of biography in literature.

The genre of biography developed out of other forms of historical nonfiction, choosing to focus on one specific person’s experience rather than all important players. There are examples of biography all the way back to 44 B.C. when Roman biographer Cornelius Nepos wrote Excellentium Imperatorum Vitae (“Lives of those capable of commanding”). The Greek historian Plutarch was also famous for his biographies, creating a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans in his book Parallel Lives . After the printing press was created, one of the first “bestsellers” was the 1550 famous biography Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari. Biography then got very popular in the 18th century with James Boswell’s 1791 publication of The Life of Samuel Johnson . Biography continues to be one of the best selling genres in literature, and has led to a number of literary prizes specifically for this form.

Examples of Biography in Literature

And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn’t care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He’s still going to make these hikes, he’d insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you’re saying that their lives matter less than some others’, and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world.

Tracy Kidder’s wonderful example of biography, Mountains Beyond Mountains , brought the work of Dr. Paul Farmer to a wider audience. Dr. Farmer cofounded the organization Partners in Health (PIH) in 1987 to provide free treatment to patients in Haiti; the organization later created similar projects in countries such as Russia, Peru, and Rwanda. Dr. Farmer was not necessarily a famous man before Tracy Kidder’s biography was published, though he was well-regarded in his own field. The biography describes Farmer’s work as well as some of his personal life.

On July 2, McCandless finished reading Tolstoy’s “Family Happiness”, having marked several passages that moved him: “He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others…” Then, on July 3, he shouldered his backpack and began the twenty-mile hike to the improved road. Two days later, halfway there, he arrived in heavy rain at the beaver ponds that blocked access to the west bank of the Teklanika River. In April they’d been frozen over and hadn’t presented an obstacle. Now he must have been alarmed to find a three-acre lake covering the trail.

( Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer)

A commanding woman versed in politics, diplomacy, and governance; fluent in nine languages; silver-tongued and charismatic, Cleopatra nonetheless seems the joint creation of Roman propagandists and Hollywood directors.

Stacy Schiff wrote a new biography of Cleopatra in 2010 in order to divide fact from fiction, and go back to the amazing and intriguing personality of the woman herself. The biography was very well received for being both scrupulously referenced as well as highly literary and imaginative.

Confident that he was clever, resourceful, and bold enough to escape any predicament, [Louie] was almost incapable of discouragement. When history carried him into war, this resilient optimism would define him.

( Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand)

I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden, one day, and he started talking about God. He [Jobs] said, “ Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50/50, maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more, and I find myself believing a bit more, maybe it’s because I want to believe in an afterlife, that when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated, somehow it lives on.”

( Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson)

Test Your Knowledge of Biography

2. Which of the following scenarios qualifies as a biography? A. A famous person contracts a ghostwriter to create an autobiography. B. A famous author writes the true and incredible life story of a little known person. C. A writer creates a book detailing the most important moments in her own life. [spoiler title=”Answer to Question #2″] Answer: B is the correct answer.[/spoiler]

3. Which of the following statements is true? A. Biographies are one of the best selling genres in contemporary literature. B. Biographies are always written about famous people. C. Biographies were first written in the 18th century. [spoiler title=”Answer to Question #3″] Answer: A is the correct answer.[/spoiler]

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Biographical literature today

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In the United States , Great Britain, and the rest of the Western world generally, biography today enjoys a moderate popular and critical esteem. In the year 1929, at the height of the biographical “boom,” there were published in the United States 667 new biographies; in 1962 exactly the same number appeared, the population in the meantime having increased by something like 50 percent. On the average, in the English-speaking world, biographical titles account for approximately 5 percent of the annual output of books. Yet they have won their share of literary prizes and for their authors a considerable degree of literary eminence; if few universally acclaimed masterpieces are being produced, it is probably true that the art of biography is seeing a higher general level of achievement than ever before. The re-creation of a life is also now being attempted in other media than that of prose. Biographical drama has of course been staged from before the time of Shakespeare; it continues to be popular, whether translated from narrative to the theatre (as the Diary of Anne Frank ) or written specifically for the stage, like Jean Anouilh’s Becket and Robert Bolt’s study of Sir Thomas More , A Man for All Seasons (which nonetheless owes a great deal to William Roper). The cinema often follows with its versions of such plays; it likewise produces original biographical films, generally with indifferent success. Television, too, offers historical “re-creations” of various sorts, and with varying degrees of responsibility, but has achieved only a few notable examples of biographical illumination, for the conflict between gripping visual presentation and the often undramatic, but important, biographical truth is difficult to resolve. Biography, indeed, seems less innovative, less rewarding of experiment, and less adaptable to new media, than does fiction or perhaps even history. Words are no longer the only way to tell a story and perhaps in time will not be regarded as the chief way; but so far they seem the best way of unfolding the full course of a life and exploring the quirks and crannies of a personality. Anchored in the truth of fact, though seeking the truth of interpretation, biography tends to be more stable than other literary arts; and its future would appear to be a predictably steady evolution of its present trends .

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Memoir, Biography, Narrative Nonfiction—How Are They Different?

Posted by Lisa Dale Norton | Feb 1, 2019 | Writing Insights | 0 |

Here we are in February, the time of year when we throw ourselves back into writing the story of our life. The end of the year, with its deepening dark and circle of celebrations, distracts. But now, we begin again, clawing our way through the relentlessness of the information cycle to a quiet rhythm of shaping words, and asking fundamental questions: What is a memoir? How is it different from biography, and how are both related to that thing called narrative nonfiction?           

Here’s my take on it:

Memoir is a story based on your life experience and what you have learned from it.

It is a winnowing of all that has happened into a tight view of a slim section of experience: the coming of age years; the head-spinning start of a career; early motherhood. But always, it is a winnowing of the vast, complicated arc of events that has constituted your life. Narrow, narrow, narrow. Find one series of events that linked together explores some vulnerable and pressing universality of life.

Biography is all about you, too—and all is the correct word. This is where you get to write about where you were born, and what went on during your young years, leaving home, setting out to make your way in the world, love, relationship, work, loss—the whole canvas.

See how biography is different from memoir?

Of course, we hope a biography will show us mistakes made and lessons learned—the vicissitudes that brought a woman to be who she is, pimples and all. We hope for some readers’ transformation as we witness the arc of that person’s life, but this is different from the expectations of the reader of memoir.

 The reader of memoir dives in for the short version, the lens of the camera zooming in to show the close up of just the years from 6 to 18, or just that summer your husband died, or just the college years that led to a Rhodes Scholarship, or just the years when you, through sheer fortitude, worked your way out of poverty, of just those events that came together to make you the vocal activist you are today. Slim focus. And from that slim focus a nugget of wisdom.

 Narrative nonfiction is a similar but slightly different beast.

This is a form where you might write about yourself and your experience a good deal, but you will also be teaching us something about the world. Maybe it’s the world of a dwindling tribe of the last subsistence whalers in the world (“The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific with a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life” by Doug Bock Clark, recently published by Little, Brown and Company), so that the story ends up being about the writer’s experience getting the story, and about the nonfiction information itself.

We could say narrative nonfiction is the wedding of journalism and memoir, and while you may not be a journalist, you can do the same thing with your story by finding a topic that is central to your manuscript and making it an equal and parallel part of the story you write about yourself. Here’s a book where a writer did just that: “Don’t Make Me Pull Over: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip” (Simon & Schuster, 2018), which combined author Richard Ratay’s personal experiences with road trips, and the history of the American road trip from post-WWII to the 1970s.

See what I mean?

If you take the time to peruse the shelves of current nonfiction in your local book shop, you will see a lot of nonfiction with the author as player in the story. Why? Because we are a culture obsessed with the personal, the “I” of everything. Neither good nor bad, just ‘tis. And so, many contemporary nonfiction books give us the writer as a character and that character’s experience. But, they also give us information: the biologist who writes about his early days in the Galapagos, and Charles Darwin; the violinist who writes about becoming first chair of an orchestra, and the violin; the dog lover who writes about her dogs, and the industry of dog shows—two parallel stories that dip into and weave around each other giving us something fresh.

The name narrative nonfiction tells you everything you need to know: narrative, which means a story, and nonfiction, which refers to a topic from our world.

Can you find your project in this spectrum? Doing so now in February will make your writing year more productive, and make you more savvy about the marketplace.

About The Columnist

Lisa Dale Norton

Lisa Dale Norton is an author, developmental book editor, and a dynamic public speaker. She is passionate about layered writing structures in narrative nonfiction that reflect the complexity of life experience, and about the transformative power of writing a memoir. She is a gifted teacher, clear communicator, and a pro at creating an environment were learning can happen. Lisa wrote America’s go-to memoir writing guide, Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir (Macmillan), and the literary nonfiction story Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills (Picador USA), which won comparisons to the writing of Annie Dillard. https://lisadalenorton.com/

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Posted on Jun 30, 2023

How to Write a Biography: A 7-Step Guide [+Template]

From time to time, nonfiction authors become so captivated by a particular figure from either the present or the past, that they feel compelled to write an entire book about their life. Whether casting them as heroes or villains, there is an interesting quality in their humanity that compels these authors to revisit their life paths and write their story.

However, portraying someone’s life on paper in a comprehensive and engaging way requires solid preparation. If you’re looking to write a biography yourself, in this post we’ll share a step-by-step blueprint that you can follow. 

How to write a biography: 

1. Seek permission when possible 

2. research your subject thoroughly, 3. do interviews and visit locations, 4. organize your findings, 5. identify a central thesis, 6. write it using narrative elements, 7. get feedback and polish the text.

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While you technically don’t need permission to write about public figures (or deceased ones), that doesn't guarantee their legal team won't pursue legal action against you. Author Kitty Kelley was sued by Frank Sinatra before she even started to write His Way , a biography that paints Ol Blue Eyes in a controversial light. (Kelley ended up winning the lawsuit, however).  

Whenever feasible, advise the subject’s representatives of your intentions. If all goes according to plan, you’ll get a green light to proceed, or potentially an offer to collaborate. It's a matter of common sense; if someone were to write a book about you, you would likely want to know about it well prior to publication. So, make a sincere effort to reach out to their PR staff to negotiate an agreement or at least a mutual understanding of the scope of your project. 

At the same time, make sure that you still retain editorial control over the project, and not end up writing a puff piece that treats its protagonist like a saint or hero. No biography can ever be entirely objective, but you should always strive for a portrayal that closely aligns with facts and reality.

If you can’t get an answer from your subject, or you’re asked not to proceed forward, you can still accept the potential repercussions and write an unauthorized biography . The “rebellious act” of publishing without consent indeed makes for great marketing, though it’ll likely bring more headaches with it too. 

✋ Please note that, like other nonfiction books, if you intend to release your biography with a publishing house , you can put together a book proposal to send to them before you even write the book. If they like it enough, they might pay you an advance to write it.  

Book Proposal Template

Craft a professional pitch for your nonfiction book with our handy template.

Once you’ve settled (or not) the permission part, it’s time to dive deep into your character’s story.  

Deep and thorough research skills are the cornerstone of every biographer worth their salt. To paint a vivid and accurate portrait of someone's life, you’ll have to gather qualitative information from a wide range of reliable sources. 

Start with the information already available, from books on your subject to archival documents, then collect new ones firsthand by interviewing people or traveling to locations. 

Browse the web and library archives

Put your researcher hat on and start consuming any piece on your subject you can find, from their Wikipedia page to news articles, interviews, TV and radio appearances, YouTube videos, podcasts, books, magazines, and any other media outlets they may have been featured in. 

Establish a system to orderly collect the information you find 一 even seemingly insignificant details can prove valuable during the writing process, so be sure to save them. 

Depending on their era, you may find most of the information readily available online, or you may need to search through university libraries for older references. 

For his landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow spent untold hours at Columbia University’s library , reading through the Hamilton family papers, visiting the New York Historical Society, as well as interviewing the archivist of the New York Stock Exchange, and so on. The research process took years, but it certainly paid off. Chernow discovered that Hamilton created the first five securities originally traded on Wall Street. This finding, among others, revealed his significant contributions to shaping the current American financial and political systems, a legacy previously often overshadowed by other founding fathers. Today Alexander Hamilton is one of the best-selling biographies of all time, and it has become a cultural phenomenon with its own dedicated musical. 

Besides reading documents about your subject, research can help you understand the world that your subject lived in. 

Try to understand their time and social environment

Many biographies show how their protagonists have had a profound impact on society through their philosophical, artistic, or scientific contributions. But at the same time, it’s worth it as a biographer to make an effort to understand how their societal and historical context influenced their life’s path and work.

An interesting example is Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World . Finding himself limited by a lack of verified detail surrounding William Shakespeare's personal life, Greenblatt, instead, employs literary interpretation and imaginative reenactments to transport readers back to the Elizabethan era. The result is a vivid (though speculative) depiction of the playwright's life, enriching our understanding of his world.

Many readers enjoy biographies that transport them to a time and place, so exploring a historical period through the lens of a character can be entertaining in its own right. The Diary of Samuel Pepys became a classic not because people were enthralled by his life as an administrator, but rather from his meticulous and vivid documentation of everyday existence during the Restoration period.

Once you’ve gotten your hands on as many secondary sources as you can find, you’ll want to go hunting for stories first-hand from people who are (or were) close to your subject.

With all the material you’ve been through, by now you should already have a pretty good picture of your protagonist. But you’ll surely have some curiosities and missing dots in their character arc to figure out, which you can only get by interviewing primary sources.

Interview friends and associates

This part is more relevant if your subject is contemporary, and you can actually meet up or call with relatives, friends, colleagues, business partners, neighbors, or any other person related to them. 

In writing the popular biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson interviewed more than one hundred people, including Jobs’s family, colleagues, former college mates, business rivals, and the man himself.

🔍 Read other biographies to get a sense of what makes a great one. Check out our list of the 30 best biographies of all time , or take our 30-second quiz below for tips on which one you should read next. 

Which biography should you read next?

Discover the perfect biography for you. Takes 30 seconds!

When you conduct your interviews, make sure to record them with high quality audio you can revisit later. Then use tools like Otter.ai or Descript to transcribe them 一 it’ll save you countless hours. 

You can approach the interview with a specific set of questions, or follow your curiosity blindly, trying to uncover revealing stories and anecdotes about your subject. Whatever your method, author and biography editor Tom Bromley suggests that every interviewer arrives prepared, "Show that you’ve done your work. This will help to put the interviewee at ease, and get their best answers.” 

Bromley also places emphasis on the order in which you conduct interviews. “You may want to interview different members of the family or friends first, to get their perspective on something, and then go directly to the main interviewee. You'll be able to use that knowledge to ask sharper, more specific questions.” 

Finally, consider how much time you have with each interviewee. If you only have a 30-minute phone call with an important person, make it count by asking directly the most pressing questions you have. And, if you find a reliable source who is also particularly willing to help, conduct several interviews and ask them, if appropriate, to write a foreword as part of the book’s front matter .

Sometimes an important part of the process is packing your bags, getting on a plane, and personally visiting significant places in your character’s journey.

Visit significant places in their life

A place, whether that’s a city, a rural house, or a bodhi tree, can carry a particular energy that you can only truly experience by being there. In putting the pieces together about someone’s life, it may be useful to go visit where they grew up, or where other significant events of their lives happened. It will be easier to imagine what they experienced, and better tell their story. 

In researching The Lost City of Z , author David Grann embarked on a trek through the Amazon, retracing the steps of British explorer Percy Fawcett. This led Grann to develop new theories about the circumstances surrounding the explorer's disappearance.

Hopefully, you won’t have to deal with jaguars and anacondas to better understand your subject’s environment, but try to walk into their shoes as much as possible. 

Once you’ve researched your character enough, it’s time to put together all the puzzle pieces you collected so far. 

Take the bulk of notes, media, and other documents you’ve collected, and start to give them some order and structure. A simple way to do this is by creating a timeline. 

Create a chronological timeline

It helps to organize your notes chronologically 一 from childhood to the senior years, line up the most significant events of your subject’s life, including dates, places, names and other relevant bits. 

You should be able to divide their life into distinct periods, each with their unique events and significance. Based on that, you can start drafting an outline of the narrative you want to create.  

Draft a story outline 

Since a biography entails writing about a person’s entire life, it will have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You can pick where you want to end the story, depending on how consequential the last years of your subject were. But the nature of the work will give you a starting character arc to work with. 

To outline the story then, you could turn to the popular Three-Act Structure , which divides the narrative in three main parts. In a nutshell, you’ll want to make sure to have the following:

• Act 1. Setup : Introduce the protagonist's background and the turning points that set them on a path to achieve a goal. 
• Act 2. Confrontation : Describe the challenges they encounter, both internal and external, and how they rise to them. Then..
• Act 3. Resolution : Reach a climactic point in their story in which they succeed (or fail), showing how they (and the world around them) have changed as a result. 

Only one question remains before you begin writing: what will be the main focus of your biography?

Think about why you’re so drawn to your subject to dedicate years of your life to recounting their own. What aspect of their life do you want to highlight? Is it their evil nature, artistic genius, or visionary mindset? And what evidence have you got to back that up? Find a central thesis or focus to weave as the main thread throughout your narrative. 

Or find a unique angle

If you don’t have a particular theme to explore, finding a distinct angle on your subject’s story can also help you distinguish your work from other biographies or existing works on the same subject.

Plenty of biographies have been published about The Beatles 一 many of which have different focuses and approaches: 

• Philip Norman's Shout is sometimes regarded as leaning more towards a pro-Lennon and anti-McCartney stance, offering insights into the band's inner dynamics. 
• Ian McDonald's Revolution in the Head closely examines their music track by track, shifting the focus back to McCartney as a primary creative force. 
• Craig Brown's One Two Three Four aims to capture their story through anecdotes, fan letters, diary entries, and interviews. 
• Mark Lewisohn's monumental three-volume biography, Tune In , stands as a testament to over a decade of meticulous research, chronicling every intricate detail of the Beatles' journey.

Finally, consider that biographies are often more than recounting the life of a person. Similar to how Dickens’ Great Expectations is not solely about a boy named Pip (but an examination and critique of Britain’s fickle, unforgiving class system), a biography should strive to illuminate a broader truth — be it social, political, or human — beyond the immediate subject of the book. 

Once you’ve identified your main focus or angle, it’s time to write a great story. 

While biographies are often highly informative, they do not have to be dry and purely expository in nature . You can play with storytelling elements to make it an engaging read. 

You could do that by thoroughly detailing the setting of the story , depicting the people involved in the story as fully-fledged characters , or using rising action and building to a climax when describing a particularly significant milestone of the subject’s life. 

One common way to make a biography interesting to read is starting on a strong foot…

Hook the reader from the start

Just because you're honoring your character's whole life doesn't mean you have to begin when they said their first word. Starting from the middle or end of their life can be more captivating as it introduces conflicts and stakes that shaped their journey.

When he wrote about Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild , author Jon Krakauer didn’t open his subject’s childhood and abusive family environment. Instead, the book begins with McCandless hitchhiking his way into the wilderness, and subsequently being discovered dead in an abandoned bus. By starting in medias res , Krakauer hooks the reader’s interest, before tracing back the causes and motivations that led McCandless to die alone in that bus in the first place.

You can bend the timeline to improve the reader’s reading experience throughout the rest of the story too…

Play with flashback 

While biographies tend to follow a chronological narrative, you can use flashbacks to tell brief stories or anecdotes when appropriate. For example, if you were telling the story of footballer Lionel Messi, before the climax of winning the World Cup with Argentina, you could recall when he was just 13 years old, giving an interview to a local newspaper, expressing his lifelong dream of playing for the national team. 

Used sparsely and intentionally, flashbacks can add more context to the story and keep the narrative interesting. Just like including dialogue does…

Reimagine conversations

Recreating conversations that your subject had with people around them is another effective way to color the story. Dialogue helps the reader imagine the story like a movie, providing a deeper sensory experience. 

One thing is trying to articulate the root of Steve Jobs’ obsession with product design, another would be to quote his father , teaching him how to build a fence when he was young: “You've got to make the back of the fence just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know. And that will show that you're dedicated to making something perfect.”

Unlike memoirs and autobiographies, in which the author tells the story from their personal viewpoint and enjoys greater freedom to recall conversations, biographies require a commitment to facts. So, when recreating dialogue, try to quote directly from reliable sources like personal diaries, emails, and text messages. You could also use your interview scripts as an alternative to dialogue. As Tom Bromley suggests, “If you talk with a good amount of people, you can try to tell the story from their perspective, interweaving different segments and quoting the interviewees directly.”

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These are just some of the story elements you can use to make your biography more compelling. Once you’ve finished your manuscript, it’s a good idea to ask for feedback. 

If you’re going to self-publish your biography, you’ll have to polish it to professional standards. After leaving your work to rest for a while, look at it with fresh eyes and self-edit your manuscript eliminating passive voice, filler words, and redundant adverbs. 

Then, have a professional editor give you a general assessment. They’ll look at the structure and shape of your manuscript and tell you which parts need to be expanded on or cut. As someone who edited and commissioned several biographies, Tom Bromley points out that a professional “will look at the sources used and assess whether they back up the points made, or if more are needed. They would also look for context, and whether or not more background information is needed for the reader to understand the story fully. And they might check your facts, too.”  

In addition to structural editing, you may want to have someone copy-edit and proofread your work.

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Importantly, make sure to include a bibliography with a list of all the interviews, documents, and sources used in the writing process. You’ll have to compile it according to a manual of style, but you can easily create one by using tools like EasyBib . Once the text is nicely polished and typeset in your writing software , you can prepare for the publication process.  

In conclusion, by mixing storytelling elements with diligent research, you’ll be able to breathe life into a powerful biography that immerses readers in another individual’s life experience. Whether that’ll spark inspiration or controversy, remember you could have an important role in shaping their legacy 一 and that’s something not to take lightly. 

Continue reading

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Article contents

Life writing.

• Craig Howes Craig Howes Department of English and Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1146
• Published online: 27 October 2020

Since 1990, “life writing” has become a frequently used covering term for the familiar genres of biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, letters, and many other forms of life narrative. Initially adopted as a critical intervention informed by post-structuralist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and especially feminist theory of the 1970s and 1980s, the term also refers to the study of life representation beyond the traditional literary and historical focus on verbal texts, encompassing not only other media—film, graphic narratives, online technologies, performance—but also research in other disciplines—psychology, anthropology, ethnic and Indigenous studies, political science, sociology, education, medicine, and any other field that records, observes, or evaluates lives.

While many critics and theorists still place their work within the realms of autobiography or biography, and others find life writing as a discipline either too ideologically driven, or still too confining conceptually, there is no question that life representation, primarily through narrative, is an important consideration for scholars engaged in virtually any field dealing with the nature and actions of human beings, or anything that lives.

• autobiography
• autofiction
• life narrative

As Julie Rak noted in 2018 , Marlene Kadar’s essay “Coming to Terms: Life Writing—from Genre to Critical Practice,” although written in 1992 , still offers a useful account of life writing’s history as a term, and is still a timely reminder to examine constantly the often-buried theoretical assumptions defining and confining it. After noting that because “life writing” was in use before “biography” or “autobiography,” it “has always been the more inclusive term,” Kadar supplies a taxonomy in the form of a progressive history. Until the 1970s, “life writing” referred to “a particular branch of textual criticism” that subjected some biographies and autobiographies, and a scattering of letters and diaries, to the same literary-critical scrutiny commonly focused upon poetry, drama, or fiction. Kadar cites Donald J. Winslow’s Life-Writing as a locus for this understanding. 1 The problem lurking here is what Kadar elsewhere refers to as “the New Critical wolf”: theoretical assumptions that are “androcentric” and privilege notions of “objective truth and narrative regularity.” Clearly wanting to label this as residual, she turns to the then-current “more broadened version” of life writing. Its champions are primarily, though not exclusively, feminist literary critics devoted to “the proliferation, authorization, and recuperation” of autobiographical texts written by “literary,” but also “ordinary,” men and women. While the “ordinary” allows “personal narratives, oral narratives and life testimonies” and even “anthropological life histories” to enter the realm of life writing, this now-dominant understanding is nevertheless problematic, because it still tends to uncritically draw such binary distinctions as fiction/autobiography, literary/non-literary non-fiction, and even male/female. Heavily influenced by postmoderism, Kadar proposes a third, emergent vision of life writing that moves beyond a desire for fixity and canonization—“with laws and law-making”—by embracing a dynamic, constantly questioning methodology: “From Genre to Critical Practice.” 2

This approach gestures toward a focus upon intersectionality in “unofficial” writing—Kadar’s example is Frederick Douglass—and toward an expansive yet politically engaged life-writing practice that can “appreciate the canon, revise it where it sees fit, and forget it where it also sees fit.” 3 The same approach should be adopted toward such terms as “the autobiographical” or “life writing itself.” After describing life writing “as a continuum that spreads unevenly and in combined forms from the so-called least fictive narration to the most fictive,” she offers her own “working definition.” Life-writing texts “are written by an author who does not continuously write about someone else”—note how biography has at best been relegated to the fringes of the realm—and “who also does not pretend to be absent from the [black, brown, or white] text himself/herself.” Neither an archive nor a taxonomy of texts, life writing employs “an imperfect and always evolving hermeneutic,” where “classical, traditional, or postmodern” approaches coexist, rather than always being set against each other. 4

Kadar’s early-1990s assessment and prophecy will serve here as loose organizational principles for describing how the move “from Genre to Critical Practice” in the ensuing years has proved to be an astonishing, though contested, unfolding of life writing as a term encompassing more initiatives by diverse communities in many locations and media that even the far-sighted Marlene Kadar could have anticipated. Even so, her insistence that life-writing critics and theorists must continue to “resist and reverse the literary and political consequences” produced by impulses toward “ʻdepersonalization’ and unrelenting ʻabstraction’” still stands. 5

From Biography to Autobiography to Life Writing

Kadar’s support for life writing as the umbrella term came in the wake of an energetic focus on autobiography as the most critically and theoretically stimulating life-narrative genre. The academic journal Biography had begun appearing in 1978 , but for all its claims to be An Interdisciplinary Quarterly , it was assumed to be largely devoted to traditional biography criticism and theory. In 1980 , James Olney noted the “shift of attention from bios to autos —from the life to the self,” which he credited with “opening things up and turning them in a philosophical, psychological and literary direction.” 6 Biography scholars would have begged to differ. Discussions of psychology, with an emphasis on psychoanalysis, and of the aesthetics of literary biography, with special attention paid to affinities with the novel, had been part of biography’s critical and theoretical environment for a century. 7 Olney however was not just arguing for autobiography’s legitimacy, but for the primacy of autos within literature itself—a key claim of his landmark monograph Metaphors of Self . 8 Olney was a convener as well as a critic and theorist. Ricia Chansky identifies the “International Symposium on Autobiography and Autobiography Studies” Olney held in 1985 as “the moment when contemporary auto/biography studies emerged as a formal discipline within the academy”—not least because it led to the creation of a newsletter that soon became the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies . Although the slashes in the title—credited to Timothy Dow Adams—suggested that a/b would not privilege “self-life writing over life writing,” the variety and sheer number of critical and theoretical works devoted to autobiography in the ensuing years made it clear that for many, it was the more interesting genre. 9

Institutionalization and professional assertion soon followed. Sidonie Smith recalls “those heady days” of creating archives and bibliographies, but also of “writing against the grain, writing counterhistories, writing beyond conventional plots and tropes.” 10 As Olney had predicted, autobiography became a flash point for critical and theoretical writing in women’s studies—a trend heavily influencing Kadar’s thoughts on life writing, and canonized in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader , whose introduction is still the most detailed account of how women critics and theorists from the 1970s to the late 1990s drew upon the most compelling feminist, post-structuralist, cultural, and political writing in their encounters with autobiographical texts. 11

This interest in autobiography—with or without the slash—produced an entire generation of influential writers. Because of their general eminence, Paul de Man’s and Roland Barthes’s comments on and experiments with autobiography were closely examined, but other theorists made autobiography their central attention. 12 Philippe Lejeune’s profoundly influential essay “The Autobiographical Pact” complemented Olney’s book on metaphors of self, and so did Paul John Eakin’s volumes Fictions of Autobiography and Touching the World as arguments for the genre’s legitimacy within literary studies. 13 A host of important books, collections, and anthologies soon followed, many with a strongly feminist approach. Sidonie Smith’s A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography was an important intervention into literary aesthetics, and Smith and Watson’s edited collection De/Colonizing the Subject forged important links between autobiography and feminist and postcolonial theory. 14 Many other feminist critics and theorists in Europe and North America in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s directed their attention as writers and editors to autobiography, among them collection editors Shari Benstock and Bella Brodsky and Celeste Schenk; monograph writers Elizabeth Bruss, Leigh Gilmore, Caroline Heilbrun, Françoise Lionnet, Nancy K. Miller, and Liz Stanley; and essayists Susan Stanford Friedman and Mary G. Mason. Following in the tradition of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own , other feminist literary and cultural historians sought out forgotten or yet-to-be-discovered women autobiographers—Patricia Meyer Spacks for the 18th century ; Mary Jean Corbett, Regenia Gagnier, Linda H. Peterson, and Valerie Sanders for the long 19th century ; Estelle C. Jelinek from the time of antiquity; and collection editor Domna C. Stanton from the medieval period to the 20th century . 15

Often viewed through the lens of literary and cultural theory, autobiography therefore became the most-discussed life-writing genre in the 1980s, and has largely remained so ever since. But from the time of Kadar’s Essays on Life Writing , the term “life writing” became increasingly employed as the umbrella term for representing the lives of others, or of one’s self. The key intervention here was Margaretta Jolly’s landmark two-volume Encyclopedia of Life Writing . Published in 2001 , the title term encompasses Autobiographical and Biographical Forms , and through her contributors, Jolly accounts in 1,090 large double-column pages not just for the genres that could be considered life writing, but for life-writing practices in a host of world regions and historical periods. She emphasizes her subject’s interdisciplinary nature. Although the “writing of lives is an ancient and ubiquitous practice,” and the term “life writing” can in England be traced back to the late 17th or early 18th century , it has only gained “wide academic acceptance since the 1980s.” While noting that “the study of autobiography is the most-long-standing and sophisticated branch of analysis in the field”—a claim that biography scholars would dispute, at least with regard to duration—Jolly grants Kadar’s wish to expand beyond the literary by including entries grounded in “anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, theology, cultural studies, and even the biological sciences,” and in forms of life narrative “outside of the written form, including testimony, artifacts, reminiscence, personal narrative, visual arts, photography, film, oral history, and so forth.” 16

The Encyclopedia also provides “international and historical perspective through accounts of life writing traditions and trends from around the world, from Classical times to the present,” and covers “popular and everyday genres and contexts—from celebrity and royal biography to working-class autobiography, letter writing, interviews, and gossip”—a continuation of work, epitomized by Smith and Watson’s Getting a Life , that pays close attention to how “ordinary” lives are produced in a variety of public and institutional settings. 17 Like Kadar, Jolly notes the “crucial influence” of “Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, African-American, and Post-Colonial Studies” upon autobiography studies’ emergence in the 1980s, and she also observes that many contributors use the term “auto/biography” to point toward a more capacious sense of the field. But also like Kadar, in an “effort to balance the emphasis on autobiography,” Jolly chooses “life writing” as her preferred term, because it can more easily accommodate “many aspects of this wide-ranging field, not to mention regions of the world, where life-writing scholarship remains in its infancy, or has yet to emerge.” 18 This ambitious and expansive reference work anticipates most of the ensuing developments in life writing.

In the same year appeared the first edition of Smith and Watson’s Reading Autobiography . Although retaining autobiography as the covering term—describing it as “a particular generic practice” that “became definitive for life writing in the West”—they share Jolly’s commitment to generic, historic, and geographical inclusivity, and take a highly detailed approach to clarifying terminology. 19 Echoing Kadar, they note that autobiography “has been vigorously challenged in the wake of postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the Enlightenment subject”—an entity whose “politics is one of exclusion.” In response, they grant that “life writing” is a more expansive term, because it can refer to “writing that takes a life, one’s own or another’s, as its subject,” whether “biographical, novelistic, historical, or explicitly self-referential.” But, always sensitive to new developments and dimensions, Smith and Watson suggest that “life narrative” is even more capacious, because it refers to “autobiographical [and presumably biographical] acts of any sort.” 20 With the added perspective of nine years, and then eighteen years for their second edition, Smith and Watson update Kadar’s 1992 account of the profound impact that feminist, postmodernist, and postcolonial theory have had upon life writing—although they still direct readers to their own Women, Autobiography, Theory for a more detailed “overview of representative theories and work up to the late 1990s.” 21 Their main point is that the theoretical work Kadar called for has been taking place: “the challenges posed by postmodernism’s deconstruction of any solid ground of selfhood and truth outside of discourse,” when coupled with “postcolonial theory’s troubling of established hierarchies of authority, tradition, and influence,” led life-writing critics and theorists to examine “generic instability, regimes of truth telling, referentiality, relationality, and embodiment,” which not only undermined “the earlier critical period’s understanding of canonical autobiography” but also “expanded the range of life writing and the kinds of stories critics may engage in rethinking the field of life narrative.” 22

An efficient two-page synopsis identifies the specific theoretical stimuli for this critical scrutiny. Lacanian psychoanalysis undercut the notion of the autonomous self, replacing it with a “split subject always constituted in language.” Derridean différance offers the insight that in life writing, as in all writing, “meaning is always in process, continuously put off, or deferred.” With Jean François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida also deconstructs the supposed boundaries between Truth and fiction, actually set by supposed “ʻmaster’” narratives. Louis Althusser’s linking of socioeconomic relations to subjectivity offers life-writing scholars interpolation as a concept for understanding life-narrative construction. Michel Foucault’s claim that discourse is an exercise of power tied to the construction of identity is also formative, and so is Bakhtinian heteroglossia as the counter to the fantasy of the unitary “I.” Feminist theory directs life-writing scholars’ attention to the relationship between the political and the personal, to the “cultural inscription and practices of embodiment,” and to the dangers inherent in universalized notions of “woman.” Frantz Fanon’s work on the colonial gaze foregrounds domination’s and subordination’s roles in the constitution of subjectivity, which postcolonial, ethnic, and feminist theorists all see as crucial for recognizing the minoritizing of subjectivity, and then decolonizing such constructions. Gay and queer studies reveal the performative nature of subjectivity, and undermine binary models of gender and sexuality. Cultural studies’ interest in “popular, public, and everyday forms of textuality, including everyday practices of self-narrating in verbal, visual, and mixed modes,” extends the range of life narratives that can be examined, and neurological studies offer insight into the brain’s material effects on memory, and into trauma’s impact on perceived identity. 23

In “Expanding Autobiography Studies,” the final chapter of their two-part critical history of the field, Smith and Watson list the important critical and theoretical initiatives of previous decades. Performativity, positionality, and relationality are presented as “Useful Theoretical Concepts.” Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter and Smith’s own Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body are cited as formative texts for recognizing that the self customarily thought of as “prior to the autobiographical expression or reflection is an effect of autobiographical storytelling.” 24 Paul John Eakin and Nancy K. Miller are credited with expanding the applicability of relationality beyond feminist theory and women’s autobiography and arriving at a virtually universal applicability for life writing. 25 The most important concept for contemporary life writing, however, is arguably positionality, because it helps critics and theorists evaluate how “culturally salient” subject positions, “always multiple and often contradictory,” find ways to tell their stories “at a particular historical moment.” Formed “at the intersections of multiple discursive trajectories,” certain life narratives insist on the significance of subjects who are dealing with “de/colonization, immigration, displacement, and exile.” Such narratives demand the critical use of such terms as “ hybrid, border, diasporic, mestiza, nomadic, migratory, minoritized ”; they also force theorists to consider the natures and purposes of Indigenous life writing. 26

Despite this emphasis on life writing as referential, registering changes in practice still tends to involve identifying and tracking what Smith and Watson call “Emergent Genres of Life Narrative.” 27 Their second edition ( 2010 ) foregrounds trauma narratives, disability life writing, and human rights narratives and testimonio ; life writing appearing from a much wider range of locations, organized under the title “Critical Geographies”; narratives that foreground developments in neuroscience, memory, and genetics; the myriad of life representations arising out of the turbulent realm of “Digitalized Forms and Identities”; the templates or familiar genres deployed for recording “Everyday Lives”; and, more generally, autocritical scholarship, which requires critics or theorists to position themselves in relation to the narratives they choose to record or study and, in some cases, to recognize the necessity of being a part or a member of the group or population whose life stories are at issue.

Smith and Watson end their anatomy and history of autobiography by noting that the many “contesting approaches” to life writing are also adding many formerly “marginal” forms to “the canon of autobiography.” In the 2010 edition, Appendix A offers definitions for “Sixty Genres of Life Narrative,” up from the fifty-two provided in the first edition. But Smith and Watson “conclude” that increases in the number of relevant texts and presenting media will lead to major shifts in critical and theoretical debates, even though at bottom, a life narrative is always “a rhetorical act embedded in the history of specific communities.” 28

Backlash, Boomlash, and Boom Echo

Raymond Williams and Marlene Kadar would both acknowledge that treating ideologies or forms of life writing as residual, dominant, or emergent, and therefore capable of being mapped onto a historical or progressive continuum, can neither assume the disappearance of earlier stages, nor prevent resurgences and unpredictable alliances. 29 Take for example the history of critical debates since the late 20th century about the relationship between biography and life writing. The focus on autobiography as the central concern for critics has often been explicit: Marlene Kadar’s 1992 provisional definition of life writing ruled out authors who “continuously write about someone else.” 30 In response, many biographers and some theorists have insisted on biography’s continuing significance, and even centrality. Everyone involved tends to agree that biography was once dominant, but is now either residual, or treated as such. But in the 21st century highly unlikely allies have been calling for a “Biographical Turn,” which for some means re-evaluating what it means to tell another’s life in different historical and cultural contexts, and for others actually means a “Return” to pre-eminence—emergent and residual, yet united in asserting biography’s value. 31

Insisting that biography’s strongest affinities lie with history, and not literature or cultural studies, Hans Renders has arguably been the most visible defender of biography against the onslaught of life writing, which he considers a “shift” into an “ideology” emerging from “comparative literature and gender and cultural studies.” According to Renders, life-writing critics and theorists present autobiographers, and sometimes themselves, as “victimized by social context” and therefore, in Michael Holroyd’s words, seeking “retrospective justice.” 32 The biographer or biography theorist respects the “scholarly imperative to analyze the world (including the past) as objectively as possible”—not “to correct injustice,” but to “understand it better.” Conversely, those who study life writing seem preoccupied with “battered and raped women,” “Mothering Narratives,” “ʻJewish Women and Comics,’” “homosexuals,” and self-proclaimed victims of “climate change” or “racism, and social exclusion.” 33 The emphasis on gender here can be read as a response to the profound impact of feminist theory on autobiography and life-writing studies, and the gestures to race and class as resistance to the tenor of emergent life-narrative scholarship.

What must also be accounted for is the sustained production of biography by trade and university publishers. Throughout the memoir boom that so many theorists, critics, and reviewers have declared, highly conventional single-volume biographies have appeared regularly, speaking to the continued public interest in what Hans Renders calls “the biographical tradition, based on individuals like Hitler or Einstein, but also less famous persons.” 34 The indisputable success of The Biographer’s Craft newsletter ( 2008 –) and the creation of the Biographers International Organization (BIO; 2010 –), with its hugely popular annual conferences, counter biography’s residual status in much life-writing criticism and theory with its continued prominence in the public sphere. And arguably, most BIO members prefer it that way. Like many poets, playwrights, and novelists, biographers are often wary of critics and theorists of literature, preferring at their conferences to discuss publishing possibilities, or to receive advice on research and writing, rather than engage in theoretical or critical analysis of biography as a genre. 35

But of course, life-writing scholars are also interested in production, with Julie Rak as the most prominent cultural historian and theorist who insists that publication and distribution are salient, and even essential, subjects of study. Although primarily concerned with autobiography, her 2013 book Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market focuses on books “written, published, sold in bookstores and circulated by public libraries for people like my grandmother.” Rak presents non-fiction “as part of a production cycle” of “commodities that are manufactured for a market by an industry,” paying close attention to the mechanics of publication, distribution, classification for purposes of sales, and advertising for books “produced by mainstream presses for large audiences”—a critical interest that she paved the way for by editing a special issue on popular auto/biography for the Canadian Review of American Studies . 36 The affordances and filters that particular models of production impose upon life narratives are technological correlatives to the ideologically informed reception that certain kinds of life writing and testimony encounter when they venture into the world. Most notably, in Tainted Witness , Leigh Gilmore evaluates how women’s life narratives arouse powerful, at times hysterical, and even violent constraints upon what they are allowed to say about life conditions, or about the actions of others—and especially powerful men. 37 Though genres and chosen media may range from published memoirs or testimonio , to congressional hearings, to court trials, to social media venues and campaigns, the dynamics are the same. Women’s life-writing narratives threaten to disrupt or damage a man’s supposed life script by adding to it details of abuse, or cruelty, or criminality. It would be hard to imagine a more vivid example of what Hans Renders objects to in life writing, but the social and political significance of such narratives also explains why they could never easily be relegated to a marginal subgenre of biography. In fact, the power dynamics in Renders’s paradigm between male-centered “objective” biography and female-produced “victim” life writing mirror those in the scenarios that Gilmore evaluates.

The rest of this article maps out the most notable developments in life-narrative scholarship since the late 20th century , drawing principally on the “Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing,” an annotated list of books, edited collections and special issues, individual articles, and dissertations that appears in Biography : An Interdisciplinary Quarterly . The sample contains roughly 21,000 entries; the discussion here will concentrate on books, edited collections, and special issues because they represent formidable and sustained studies of some aspect of the field, or point to a community of scholars engaged in similar work. While essentially tracing out Kadar’s three-stage progressive account of life writing, this article will also provide examples of critical and theoretical practice to elaborate on the expansions, revisions, departures, and interventions that the practice of life-writing and life-narrative scholarship has produced. The discussion concludes by identifying a few ideas that might offer new directions or understandings for those interested in how lives are represented.

Biography Studies Sustained—Residual as Dominant and Emergent

For a genre supposedly lapsing into subordinate status or irrelevance, biography continues to attract a great deal of critical and theoretical attention. Though usually retracing that familiar Western trajectory running from Rome through to contemporary trade publications, historical or thematic overviews, often written by well-known biographers, appear regularly. Some are reader-friendly primers, such as Nigel Hamilton’s Brief History , Hermione Lee’s Very Short Introduction , and Andrew Brown’s Brief History of Biography: From Plutarch to Celebs , all of which appeared in the early 21st century . More “weighty” accounts include Catherine N. Parke’s Biography: Writing Lives and Paula R. Backscheider’s Reflections , both published in the 1990s. 38 Before any of these histories, however, came Carl Rollyson’s Biography: An Annotated Bibliography ( 1992 ), which organized and annotated the critical literature in English. Arguably the most prolific writer on biography theory and criticism, Rollyson has published many biographies—political, literary, and cinematic—and several guides and essay collections about theory and practice. 39 Biography: A User’s Guide , for instance, discusses keywords alphabetically; Hans Renders and Nigel Hamilton adopt a similar format for The ABC of Modern Biography . 40 A popular sub-genre comprises books for would-be biographers written by famous practitioners. Extending back to Leon Edel, more recent examples include Michael Holroyd’s Works on Paper , Carl Rollyson’s Confessions of a Serial Biographer , and Nigel Hamilton’s How to Do Biography —a companion volume to his Brief History . 41

Literary lives appear prominently in all of these works, and many texts take them as their subject. John Batchelor’s The Art of Literary Biography and Warwick Gould and Thomas F. Staley’s Writing the Lives of Writers are edited collections arising out of conferences in the 1990s; more recently, Robert Dion and Frédéric Regard have edited Les nouvelles écritures biographiques , and Richard Bradford has overseen a substantial Companion to Literary Biography . 42 Individual monographs include Michael Benton’s Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography , and Rana Tekcan’s Too Far for Comfort . And even though she has reservations about focusing on female writers, Alison Booth’s How to Make It as a Woman is a detailed and insightful study of literary biography in the 19th and 20th centuries . 43

Despite literary biography’s apparently privileged status, historians have also explored biography’s significance to their field. Barbara Caine’s Biography and History was followed by two edited collections from the Netherlands: Hans Renders and Binne de Haan’s Theoretical Discussions of Biography ; and Renders, de Haan, and Jonne Harmsma’s The Biographical Turn . Both volumes argue for biography as a historical genre that does not share life writing’s preoccupations with race, class, and gender. That the distinction is significant is also suggested by the title of Tanya Evans and Robert Reynolds’s “Introduction to this Special Issue on Biography and Life-Writing” for disclosure . 44 German historians have also displayed a strong interest in biography, in edited clusters such as Atiba Pertilla’s and Uwe Spiekermann’s “The Challenge of Biography,” or Sarah Panter’s Mobility and Biography . 45

Monographs and collections have delineated specific periods and locations for study. Thomas Hägg’s The Art of Biography in Antiquity has some affinities with the Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography , edited by Stephanos Efthymiadis; with Sharpe and Zwicker’s edited collection on early modern England; and with Mombert and Rosellini’s edited volume Usages des vies . Juliette Atkinson’s Victorian Biography Reconsidered is an astute and suggestive study of England’s intense preoccupation with various forms of the genre. 46 And while such works tend to confine themselves to Western Europe—Great Britain, France, and Germany/Austria—or the United States, collections have focused on other regions, among them Eastern Europe and the Nordic countries. 47

Despite the longstanding suspicion of considering biography through the lens of contemporary theory, a substantial number of such works have appeared since c. 2005 , many from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna. Wilhelm Hemecker, its director, has edited or co-edited several volumes; among them is the remarkable Theorie der Biographie , co-edited with Bernhard Fetz, which contains excerpts from famous authors and theorists with special relevance for biography—Samuel Johnson, Thomas Carlyle, William Dilthey, Sigfried Kracauer, Michel Foucault, the Vienna psychoanalysts—paired with commentaries by contemporary biography scholars. Fetz also edited Die Biographie—Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie , which appeared in 2009 . 48 More than a decade earlier, a similar overview was provided by Biographical Creation / La création biographique , an English/French volume edited by Marta Dvorak. 49 Monographs taking a sustained theoretical approach to biography are relatively rare. Two of the most notable are Susan Tridgell’s Understanding Our Selves and Caitríona Ní Dhúill’s Metabiography , an impressive overview by a scholar formerly at the Boltzmann Institute. 50

The subtitle of the journal Biography promises interdisciplinary scholarship. Thanks largely to Freud, psychoanalytic and psychological approaches to life narrative have appeared for over a century, with psychobiography emerging as a clearly delineated discipline. Alan C. Elms’s Uncovering Lives led the way, with William Todd Schultz’s Handbook of Psychobiography offering a synthesis of scholarly activity by such researchers as psychologist Dan P. McAdams, author of The Redemptive Self and many other studies of personality. 51 Other social sciences at times have taken their own biographical turn, among them both archaeology and anthropology. 52

Indigenous studies scholarship represents a significant emerging engagement. A special issue of Biography entitled “Indigenous Conversations about Biography” explores the genre’s value and dangers for researchers recovering or creating archives, histories, and life records. In The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen , Noenoe K. Silva refers to her method of establishing critical and publishing genealogies for Hawaiians writing in Hawaiian in the 19th and early 20th centuries as bio-bibliography. Fine arts scholars are also assessing what biography contributes to their disciplines. Melanie Unseld’s Biographie und Musikgeschichte examines the genre’s usefulness for those interested in musical culture and historiography, and a Biography special issue entitled “Verse Biography” should not be immediately conflated with literary biography. Though the lives discussed are in verse, the subjects are not necessarily writers. 53

In their introduction to “Indigenous Conversations about Biography,” Alice Te Punga Somerville and Daniel Heath Justice note that even though the term “life writing” is common in academic circles, and even though the plan for the seminar for contributors held in Honolulu was to “unpack, repack, and throw out terms once we’re at the table,” they chose to stay with biography because it “is well-known in Indigenous circles,” concluding that “there is still life in this old term ʻbiography’ yet.” 54 The same can be said for the publishing world; in fact, “biographies” are regularly appearing for non-human subjects. Noted biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd published London: The Biography in 2000 ; the “concise” version followed in 2012 . In Britain, biographies of the Ordnance Survey and the English Breakfast have also appeared. 55 Resisting relegation, biography can still raise and fulfill expectations of a chronological, substantial, and interesting narrative that deals with real subjects, human or otherwise—a good story, with the added virtue of being true.

Autobiography and Auto/Biography—Mapping Self-Representation

If autobiography studies began in the late 1970s, its institutionalization occurred in the mid- and late 1980s, and its later codification came with the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and works such as Smith and Watson’s Reading Autobiography , the years since 1990 have also seen sustained efforts to define and further theorize the genre in ways that expand its range and history. Handbooks such as the two editions of Linda Anderson’s Autobiography and Laura Marcus’s Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction offer brief, engaging entries into the genre’s past and present. Other efforts to map out auto/biography as a generic marker and critical practice include The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader , edited by Ricia Anne Chansky and Emily Hipchen. Much of the content first appeared in the pages of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies , which they co-edit. Ashley Barnwell and Kate Douglas’s co-edited Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies provides an overview of work being conducted in the field as the 21st century enters its third decade, often with suggestions for future directions. 56

Volumes devoted to theory include Carole Allamand’s book about Philippe Lejeune’s great influence on “ l’autobiographie en théorie ” or Lia Nicole Brozgal’s Against Autobiography . Marlene Kadar’s emphasis on the postmodern is mirrored in edited collections by Ashley et al. and Couser and Fichtelberg, and in Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir’s monograph Borderlines . 57 Other scholars turned their attention to the field’s historical and geographical reach. 58 In the United States, slave narratives have been a major subject for research. William L. Andrews’s To Tell a Free Story and Slavery and Class in the American South have been major contributions to this field. 59 If we add Rachel McLennan’s American Autobiography , the result is an emphatic rejection of Georges Gusdorf’s highly influential claim that autobiography was an 18th-century product of the Western European Enlightenment. 60

Over the course of his career, Paul John Eakin, one of the early champions of autobiographies as literary texts, has shifted his attention to autobiographies as foundational, even neurological, imperatives in all people. As the titles of How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves and Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative suggest, his close readings of published autobiographies are gestures toward identifying the structures and narratives of consciousness that constitute humans as humans. More philosophical in emphasis, Richard Freadman’s Threads of Life shares Eakin’s conviction that autobiography offers valuable information about human nature. 61 Autobiography has however attracted most critical and theoretical interest in the realm of the political, often with feminism as the starting point. Liz Stanley’s The Auto/Biographical I and Laura Marcus’s Auto/Biographical Discourses were influential British monographs; and Broughton and Anderson’s edited collection, Women’s Lives/Women’s Times , turned the tables by suggesting that autobiography could contribute to feminist theory, as well as the other way around. Many of these monographs and collections were powerfully shaped by work on the distinctiveness of women’s writing, most notably the autobiographical/theoretical texts of Hélène Cixous such as Rootprints , which emerged from her famous writings in the 1970s on l’écriture féminine . Noted memoirists such as Jill Ker Conway, in her When Memory Speaks , also evaluate how differently men and women understand and write about their lives. 62

Other scholars have worked to establish traditions of women’s self-representation, whether Florence S. Boos in Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women ; Laura Beard’s Acts of Narrative Resistance , which focuses on autobiographical writing in the Americas; or Marilyn Booth’s Journal of Women’s History special issue, “Women’s Autobiography in South Asia and the Middle East.” Some of the most visible theoretical works address the challenges of speaking out through autobiography against political or social repression. A 2008 special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly was simply entitled “Witness.” Two of the best-known monographs are Gillian Whitlock’s Soft Weapons , which investigates the strategies Middle Eastern women employ to attract Western audiences in order to inform them about life during a time of forced globalization, emigration, and wars on terror; and Leigh Gilmore’s previously mentioned Tainted Witness , which looks at high-profile witnesses such as Anita Hill and Rigoberta Menchú to analyze the relationship between gender and credibility within patriarchal cultures. 63

Though strongly influenced by feminist theory, other critics and theorists extend their discussions of testimony out to a wide range of locations and chosen media. Cynthia Franklin and Laura E. Lyons co-edited “Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing” as a special issue of Biography . The essays in Tracing the Autobiographical , edited by Marlene Kadar and colleagues, explore the interplay between genre, location, national politics, ethics, and life narrative. Although Leigh Gilmore entitled her 2000 monograph The Limits of Autobiography , subtitled Trauma, Testimony, Theory— and although a 2008 Southern Review special issue explores “The Limits of Testimony”—developments such as the Me Too movement suggest that personal witnessing by the abused or persecuted will continue to attract the attention of autobiography scholars. 64

A similar impulse accounts for the close attention being paid to autobiographical sub-genres. Prominent among these is memoir, which some would argue should become the covering term. G. Thomas Couser’s Memoir: An Introduction offers a concise yet rich overview of the form, with an emphasis on American memoir, while Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History provides a detailed account of the form’s fortunes over time. Both Couser and Yagoda move smoothly between “literary” examples and more commercial texts, acknowledging that popular publications of the 21st century are primarily responsible for many critics and reviewers declaring that we are living during a memoir “boom.” As with autobiography, however, some critics are hesitant to let this form of life writing refer to almost any mode of self-representation. A 2018 edited collection describes its task as Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir . 65

Autobiography scholars have also directed their attention to the less prestigious, and even unpublished sub-genres of written self-representation. Philippe Lejeune’s longstanding interest in personal journals has resulted in articles and books drawing their subjects from over four centuries and a variety of media—from manuscripts to computer screens. On Diary , a collection of English translations on the subject, is similar in its distillation of stimulating thought to On Autobiography , Lejeune’s landmark 1989 collection. The sheer number, variety, and importance of his publications confirm his status as a pre-eminent scholar of self-representation since the 1980s. In French, his work on diary is complemented by such works as Françoise Simonet-Tenant’s Le journal intime . In English, decades before On Diary appeared, Lejeune made an important contribution to Inscribing the Daily , edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff. In that same collection, Helen Buss’s “A Feminist Revision of New Historicism to Give Fuller Readings of Women’s Private Writing” offers another example of how contemporary feminist theory engaged with other theoretical movements, and often did so by drawing upon autobiography as a source for hidden or “sub-literary” women’s texts. 66

Since c. 1990 , the auto- in auto/biography studies has largely set the agenda for theoretical and critical approaches to life writing; indeed, for many scholars, autobiography is all but synonymous with life narrative. But as Marlene Kadar noted in 1992 , the term “life writing” offers possibilities for study that autobiography cannot accommodate, or will even distort, as a survey of what has been pursued under the life banner makes all too clear. 67

Life Writing and Life Narrative—Emergence and Pervasion

In the years since Margaretta Jolly’s Encyclopedia of Life Writing appeared, many substantial works have addressed aspects and practices of life writing as an interdiscipline. Zachary Leader’s On Life-Writing is one of his many publications as a critic, theorist, and editor, and although literary biography is Richard Bradford’s primary interest, in his edited collection Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature , the term serves as a container for the more familiar designations. The title of Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader , a compendium of the most influential essays by two of autobiography’s most prolific and prominent critics, theorists, and editors, does something similar, and in fact many prominent a/b theorists have made the shift, at least in their titles, to a “life” designation. Liz Stanley’s 2013 edited collection is called Documents of Life Revisited , and the title of her 2010 guest-edited special issue of Life Writing is “In Dialogue: Life Writing and Narrative Inquiry.” Perhaps most significantly, almost twenty years after his landmark discussion of metaphors of self, James Olney, the acknowledged founder of autobiography studies, published Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing . 68

The term increasingly appeared in publications about its fortunes in academia. When Miriam Fuchs and I edited a volume for the Modern Language Association’s Options for Teaching series, in the interests of full coverage, we entitled it Teaching Life Writing Texts . A decade later, Laurie McNeill and Kate Douglas’s a/b: Auto/Biography Studies special issue on pedagogy, and the resulting Routledge edited collection, were both called “Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives.” For its two clusters on the subject, the European Journal of Life Writing took the same title as Fuchs and me, with the obvious addition “in Europe.” 69

As has been the case with both biography and autobiography, as part of its codification life writing has undergone a great deal of historical and regional analysis. Sometimes the results are interdisciplinary, such as Penny Summerfield’s Histories of the Self , but in the case of the multi-volume Oxford History of Life-Writing (Zachary Leader gen. ed.) the goal is to produce a comprehensive survey. The first two volumes, covering the Middle Ages and the early modern period respectively, appeared in 2018 . Other decidedly British, period-based publications include David Amigoni’s edited collection Life Writing and Victorian Culture , and Andrew Tate’s special issue of Nineteenth Century Contexts , “Victorian Life Writing.” 70 The historical focus extends to France and Germany in the Modern Language Studies special issue “Co-Constructed Selves: Nineteenth-Century Collaborative Life Writing.” Entirely European surveys include Écrire des vies: Espagne, France, Italie, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle, and German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century . 71

Continuing in the tradition of feminist critical interventions through autobiography, life writing has become a covering term for studies of women’s writing over the centuries and around the world. Some publications explicitly link theoretical positions to life writing; for instance, the Prose Studies special issue devoted to “Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities,” which puts Benedict Anderson’s brand of political science and cultural history into play. Other works employ life writing to map out genealogies of women authors and intellectuals. The edited collection Writing Medieval Women’s Lives reclaims a number of European subjects, and after writing Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing , Julie Eckerle co-edited Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland with Naomi McAreavey. Reversing the pattern, Amy Culley followed up Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850 , a collection co-edited with Daniel Cook, with a monograph entitled British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840 . 72 Susan Civale’s Romantic Women’s Life Writing covers much of the British nineteenth century , as does “Silence in the Archives: Censorship and Suppression in Women’s Life Writing,” a special issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century . Another co-edited collection, Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading , ranges from slave narratives to Virginia Woolf. Finally, in Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism , Margaretta Jolly argues for the enduring power of written correspondence, whether on paper or as e-mail. 73

Delineations of criticism and theory from specific regions have adopted life writing as an organizing principle. “African American Life Writing” is the title of an a/b: Auto/Biography Studies special issue; other volumes dealing with North American subjects include Viola Amato’s Shifts in the Representation of Intersex Lives in North American Literature and Popular Culture , and Katherine Adams’s monograph Owning Up . 74 Ongoing work on European life writing has resulted in several survey collections. Life Writing Matters in Europe , paradoxically published in the Winter-Verlag American Studies series, is one of the more expansive volumes, but the region examined can be more specific, as in Simona Mitroiu’s Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe , or the European Journal of Life Writing ’s cluster “Life Writing Trajectories in Post- 1989 Eastern Europe”—despite the fact that “Eastern Europe” is a highly contested term. 75 A life-narrative focus can also govern work on non-European and non-North American regions, whether Africa, Australia, the Pacific, or South East Asia. 76 As for India, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies has featured a cluster entitled “Narratives of Transformation: Religious Conversion and Indian Traditions of Life Writing,” and Biography ’s 2017 special issue, “Caste and Life Narratives,” has been republished in India as an edited collection. An especially ambitious effort at global reach is Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies , which features essays about Malaysia, Indonesia, South Africa, Great Britain, Hawaiʻi, Iraq, Australia, India, and China as part of its effort to interrogate the dominance of Euro-American theoretical paradigms. 77

A number of prominent scholars have devoted books to decolonial, postcolonial, and diasporic life writing. Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Life-Writing presented itself as “the first critical assessment” of such texts in English. Philip Holden’s Autobiography and Decolonization casts a wide net in its analysis of life writing by Asian and African leaders of countries emerging from imperial occupation, and Gillian Whitlock’s Postcolonial Life Narratives surveys 18th- to 21st-century works by Indigenous and settler life writers on at least four continents. Edited collections include the 2013 special issue of Life Writing entitled “Women’s Life Writing and Diaspora,” and the books Ethnic Life Writing and Histories and Transculturing Auto/Biography . 78

Life writing has become a common component across disciplinary fields. “The Work of Life Writing,” an a/b: Auto/Biography Studies special issue, features articles grounded in family dynamics, working-class autobiography, ethnography, ecological studies, philosophy, medicine, political and social commentary, and institutional investigations. Paul John Eakin’s edited collection The Ethics of Life Writing foregrounds the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, but also explores testimonio , race, disclosure, and life writing as an agent of harm. David Parker’s The Self in Moral Space examines life writing as a site for ethical analysis. Life Writing has published a special issue entitled “Philosophy and Life Writing,” and Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies one called “Life Writing as Empathy.” On a more discursive note, Joan Ramon Resina’s edited collection Inscribed Identities focuses on language as constitutive of the subject. 79

Vulnerability and precarity are central concerns for many life-writing sub-genres. Since the late 20th century , G. Thomas Couser has been the most prominent scholar exploring the relationship between life narrative and disability in his monographs and edited and co-edited collections. 80 Trauma in its various forms has been an important concern for life-writing scholars. Suzette A. Henke’s Shattered Subjects was one of the first publications to address profound physical and psychological upheavals, experienced personally or collectively. Susanna Egan’s Mirror Talk examines how crisis leads to cultural expression in media ranging from film to hybrid literary forms, and from quilting to comics. Miriam Fuchs’s The Text Is Myself explores the different forms life writing can take in response to historical, political, and personal assault. Gillian Whitlock and Kate Douglas’s co-edited Trauma Texts began as a special issue of Life Writing entitled “Trauma in the Twenty-First Century”; another edited collection in this field is Haunted Narratives: Life Writing in an Age of Trauma . 81 Meg Jensen’s The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical discusses prison poems, testimonio , war memorials, and other sites of commemoration as “complex interrogative negotiations of trauma and its aftermath.” Life writing and medicine has been attracting increasing attention. Mita Banerjee’s Medical Humanities in American Studies is a representative example. 82

Trauma can also be collective and global, and life writing often proves to be a crucial factor in judgment and restitution. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith’s Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores how personal narratives often serve as the chosen response to national violence and deliberate crimes against humanity. Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly’s edited collection We Shall Bear Witness , and Katja Kurz’s monograph Narrating Contested Lives , both of which appeared in 2014 , also discuss life writing in the context of human rights. Testimony against institutional abuse is the subject of Melissa Dearey’s Radicalization , and social movements such as Me Too and Black Lives Matter foreground life narrative as a strategy for opposing oppression and violence carried out by state agents and those invested in economic, political, or cultural dominance. Brittney Cooper and Treva B. Lindsey’s co-edited special issue of Biography , “M4BL and the Critical Matter of Black Lives,” combines theory and personal testimony in an innovative manner. 83

Are Life Narratives always Life Writing?

Many critical and theoretical works of the 21st century seem to leave the writing behind—a major reason life narrative is increasingly chosen as the covering term. While Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames is one of the most important books on life writing for many reasons, her attention to the power of images on the understanding of the past, extending even to Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus , has been profoundly influential. By calling attention to the frequent disjunctions between text and photographs, Timothy Dow Adams’s Light Writing & Life Writing is also a transitional text of sorts, anticipating the emergence of comics and other visual and verbal hybrids as major sites for examining life representation. 84 “Autographics,” a Biography special issue co-edited by Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, is one of many collections and monographs that explore how life narratives are embodied in comic and other graphic forms. Hillary Chute, a prolific editor, interviewer, archivist, critic, and theorist of comics, has published two monographs that document the intersections of comics, life writing, feminism, and history: Graphic Women and Disaster Drawn . 85 Michael A. Chaney’s Reading Lessons in Seeing , and his edited collection Graphic Subjects , are substantial contributions to theorizing the interplay between life writing and comics. Elisabeth El Refaie’s Autobiographical Comics is another extended study, and Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley’s co-edited collection Canadian Graphic is devoted to a single country’s comics life-writing production. 86

Critical and theoretical work on other hybrid genres includes Anna Poletti’s Intimate Ephemera , Ellen Gruber Garvey’s Writing with Scissors , and Hertha D. Sweet Wong’s Picturing Identity , which discusses forms ranging from book art to comics to sketch illustrations to geographic installations. Almost any life-writing analysis must now engage with the pervasiveness of visual representation, which can be recognized as having been an important component for many centuries as well. For instance, the texts examined in Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall’s Witnessing Girlhood , a study of testimonial traditions that draws together gender, youth, and race, range from slave narratives and testimonio to comics and picture books. 87

Responding to the proliferation of critical and theoretical engagements across genres, media, and disciplines, in a special issue of Life Writing , and a subsequent book, co-editors David McCooey and Maria Takolander ask what “the limits of life writing,” if any, might be. Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser implicitly ask the same question in their co-edited Biography special issue entitled “(Post)Human Lives”; and in another Biography special issue, “Life Writing and Corporate Personhood,” co-editors Purnima Bose and Laura E. Lyons's examine how analogies to human life narratives pervade institutional and business self-promotion. Grounding lives in natural environments is the organizing principle for Alfred Hornung and Zhao Baisheng’s co-edited collection Ecology and Life Writing . 88 Just as trade publishers are labeling engaging narratives about anything from God to salt as biographies, so the critical concept of life writing is being stretched to contain virtually anything that presents or mimics a human story.

In terms of critical and theoretical attention, however, no medium for life narratives has been more immediately recognized in its emergence, or more closely examined, than what a pair of Biography special issues have identified as “Online Lives” and “Online Lives 2.0.” Anna Poletti and Julie Rak address the same phenomenon in their edited collection Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online . 89 The prevalence, and even dominance, of life narratives in online environments has caused critics and theorists to recalibrate their work to account for this migration and mediation. This is especially true for studies of young life writers. The title of Emma Maguire’s book Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies takes for granted that the narratives to be discussed will be online, and Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti’s Life Narratives and Youth Culture ranges from more traditional memoirs, letters, and diaries to social media. 90

Moving beyond the exclusively written has also revivified a longstanding awareness of biography as performance. Popular from film’s earliest days, the biopic has attracted substantial critical and theoretical attention. George Custen’s pathbreaking volume Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History was published in 1992 , and a Biography special issue entitled “The Biopic,” edited by Glenn Man, appeared in 2000 . Originally a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies , William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer’s co-edited Invented Lives, Imagined Communities dwells on the history and the cultural shaping force of film biographies. While providing a historical overview, Dennis Bingham’s massive Whose Lives Are They Anyway? focuses on post-World War II films, with a particular emphasis on biopics with women subjects. Tom Brown and Belén Vidal’s co-edited collection The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture takes on a similar subject. 91 Biopic critics’ interest in actors and impersonation links their work to life-writing studies of performance. Ryan Claycomb’s Lives in Play argues that since the 1970s, life narratives have been central to the construction and performance of feminist theater. A special issue of LiNQ: Connected Writing and Scholarship entitled “Performing Lives” focuses upon the literal and metaphorical aspects of performance resulting from life writing’s migration “into other media including film, television, online, theatre, and the gallery.” Other scholars are studying those figures whose performance of their public identities led to great and enduring notoriety or acclaim. Clara Tuite’s Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity subordinates the events of Byron’s life to a study of the fascination he aroused, and continued to arouse, in the public. Daniel Herwitz discusses celebrity in The Star as Icon , and Katja Lee and Lorraine York tackle a similar subject in their co-edited collection Celebrity Cultures in Canada , though they restrict their stargazing to a single country. 92 Fan studies are an integral part of popular-culture scholarship, employing a vocabulary awash in terms such as idols, icons, influencers, and “reality” stars.

The quotation marks around “reality” point to a critical commonplace about life writing—that as acts of representation, such texts necessarily employ fictional materials and constructs. The veracity claims of life-writing texts, captured in a term like non-fiction, are always under scrutiny, and sometimes considered subordinate to concerns with aesthetics or craft—a belief expressed in the term “creative non-fiction.” Efforts to blur or eliminate the borders between fiction and non-fiction are often motivated by a desire to absorb life narratives back into the domain of literature, and principally prose fiction, where the commitment to art may require writers to remake historical fact or the contents of memory in response to the demands of form and aesthetics. Although Serge Doubrovsky is credited with coining the term “autofiction” in the 1970s to describe his own work, many critical and theoretical monographs treat this process as their principal concern, among them Max Saunders’s Self-Impression , and Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir’s Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction . Edited collections also address the significance of these generic boundaries. Chief among these is Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf’s three-volume Handbook of Autobiogography/Autofiction . In Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos of Our Times, Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Cynthia M. Chambers, and Carl Leggo suggest that the interplay between personal histories and aesthetics has a profound moral component, while the title Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction suggests where that volume’s editors consider the most interesting of those experiments to occur. A related juxtaposition appears in the title of Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Catherine Viollet’s co-edited volume Genèse et autofiction , and the title of Helena Grice’s Asian American Fiction, History, and Life Writing lays out a continuum of sorts. 93

The greatest champion for biofiction as a sub-discipline is critic and theorist Michael Lackey, who has written, edited, or co-edited numerous books and collections. 94 It is fair to say that those interested in biofiction are primarily concerned with how the historical is drawn into the literary, and that the resulting sub-genre’s appeal is not its historical veracity, but its enlistment of history and biography in the cause of literary aesthetics. One parallel but distinctly different area of interest regards the hoax life narrative. Susanna Egan’s Burdens of Proof evaluates a number of texts produced through literary imposture, and Nancy K. Miller’s “The Entangled Self” is an astute and suggestive discussion of the issue. 95

The discussion has travelled full circle—from a virtual abandonment of the desire to see life writing as literature, or even necessarily verbal, with a corresponding emphasis on the cultural, political, visual, or virtual, to a reassertion of literature, and more specifically prose fiction, as setting the highest and most appropriate standards for writers of historically and biographically informed creative prose. The journey itself, however, suggests just how capacious the term “life writing” has become.

Future Thoughts—Life, Biobits, and the Environment

Marlene Kadar argued in 1992 that life writing had to extend itself beyond genre to critical practice. 96 In the intervening years, the number of genres and sub-genres, the amount of critical and theoretical attention, and the variety of practices undertaken have increased at an accelerating rate. It seems appropriate to close with some observations about how rethinking certain components of life writing as understood, theorized, and practiced might lead to new directions and widened perspectives. Those components are the fundamental ones—“life” and “writing/narrative.” Lauren Berlant offers insights into the first, and Marlene Kadar the second. With Kadar again providing the enabling metaphor, the discussion will finally turn to what should be the next theoretical transition for life writing—from practice to environment.

After being invited to witness “Life Writing and Intimate Publics,” the 2010 International Auto/Biography Association conference held in Sussex, United Kingdom, Lauren Berlant was asked her opinion about how the participants had dealt not only with her famous term, but also with life writing, the organization’s reason for being. Berlant confessed she was “worried about the presumed self-evident value of bionarrative”:

I kept asking people to interrogate how the story of having a “life” itself coasts on a normative notion of human biocontinuity: what does it mean to have a life, is it always to add up to something? . . . To my ear, the genre of the “life” is a most destructive conventionalized form of normativity: when norms feel like laws, they constitute a sociology of the rules for belonging and intelligibility whose narrowness threatens people’s capacity to invent ways to attach to the world. 97

Berlant’s comment is very helpful, because it prompts us to look seriously at the “bio” of autobiography and biography, and at the “life” of life writing. She suggests locales where this interrogation is already underway:

Queer, socialist/anti-capitalist, and feminist work have all been about multiplying the ways we know that people have lived and can live, so that it would be possible to take up any number of positions during and in life in order to have “a life.” 98

Such work has expanded the range and value of life writing as a practice; an even stronger commitment to determining what is meant by “a life” can only lead to new possibilities for socially and politically engaged scholarship.

But Berlant is suspicious of “writing” as well, and not because the attention of so much scholarship has been redirected to graphic narratives, or online. Her concern about the “self-evident value of bionarrative” also suggests that replacing “life writing” with “life narrative” as the covering term might still set an uninterrogated limit on what we should be examining. Entertaining the possibility of “a biography of gesture, of interruption,” Berlant asks rhetorically “Shouldn’t life writing be a primary laboratory for theorizing ʻthe event’?” 99 Marlene Kadar argues that such theoretical practice is already happening. In her essay “The Devouring: Traces of Roma in the Holocaust,” she campaigns for including “the fragment and trace as member-genres in the taxonomy of auto/biographical practices” outlined in such theoretical works as her own “(flawed) 1992 definition of life-writing texts.” 100 Drawing upon Blanchot’s sense of the fragment as “an unfinished separation that is always reaching out for further interpretation,” Kadar suggests that when confronted with the near-erasure of all evidence that a life was ever lived, we can register affect even when lacking narrative. Any surviving evidence of a life can potentially express “more than what happened,” and anything that “helps us to understand what the particular event means to the subject, can be read as autobiographical.” Whether a song, a tattoo, an anecdote, or a name on a list, in its evocative yet resisting brevity, the fragment speaks of a life without providing even the outline of a realized narrative—“what it felt like, not exactly what it was like.” 101 Kadar therefore sets forth “the fragment and trace as genres that both contribute to our previous theorizations” of autobiography and life narrative, but “also as necessarily unfinished genres that call out to us to attempt to finish them”—often with important critical and political results. 102 One might add that, in discursive terms, the fragment or trace can be thought of as analogous to the morpheme—they are the smallest units recognizable as evidence of a life. With an embedded reference to virtual and online representation, these fragments and traces might be termed “biobits.”

The biobit would represent the micro limit of life writing theory; drawing upon but extending Kadar once more, one can suggest what the macro might be. In “Whose Life Is It Anyway? Out of the Bathtub and into the Narrative,” Kadar insists on the need to “theorize a new genre that still goes beyond and yet includes the old word [autobiography], the old gender, and the old style,” but will also “name what is now.” But this new genre must differ markedly from our common understanding, because “like water,” which “assumes the shape of the vessel” containing it, the nature of the contents of this new genre will not be determined or defined by the container. The “essence” of genre “can never really be captured.” 103 To elaborate on this thought, Kadar turns to a novel by Gail Scott. While most of the main character’s life takes place in a bathtub, we know that at some point she will have to leave it—a move that will carry her “Out of the Bathtub and into Narrative.” Life writing, then, is best thought of not as a container, a genre, or a practice, but to the greatest extent possible, as a component of uncontained water: an ocean, an environment in which micro biomass—biobits—coexists with the largest, most familiar, most coherent examples—the biographies and autobiographies, the autoethnographies and the biopics, the online presences and the comics. Though all are in some way engaged in and linked through bio-representation, only some are implicated in writing, or even in narrative.

If viewed in this way, all of life writing’s inherited genres and sub-genres remain useful and productive methods for describing, comparing, and acting. But it must always be remembered that neither genre nor practice is sufficient as a ground or container for theorizing what may still be called life writing or life narrative, but could perhaps be more accurately referred to as signs of life.

1. See Julie Rak, “Marlene Kadar’s Life Writing: Feminist Theory outside the Lines,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 33, no. 3 (2018): 541–549 ; Marlene Kadar, “Coming to Terms: Life Writing—From Genre to Critical Practice,” in Essays on Life Writing , ed. Marlene Kadar (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992 ), 3–16, quotation at 4; and Donald J. Winslow, Life-Writing: A Glossary of Terms in Biography, Autobiography, and Related Forms , Biography Monographs (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1980 ). Winslow’s book first appeared as Donald J. Winslow, “Glossary of Terms in Life Writing,” pts. 1 and 2, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1978): 61–78; and 1, no. 2 (1978): 61–85.

2. For the phrase “the New Critical wolf,” see Marlene Kadar, “Whose Life Is It Anyway? Out of the Bathtub and into the Narrative,” in Kadar, Essays on Life Writing , 152–161, at 154. For the other quotations, see Kadar, “Coming to Terms,” 4–6.

3. Kadar, “Coming to Terms,” 9.

4. Kadar, “Coming to Terms,” 10.

5. Kadar “Coming to Terms,” 12. Kadar notes that her argument here is informed by pp. 162–165 of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “To Write My Self: The Autobiographies of Afro-American Women,” in Feminist Issues in Literature Scholarship , ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987 ), 161–180.

6. James Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical , ed. James Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980 ), 3–27.

7. For a sampling of such texts, see Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians , reprinted ed. (London: Penguin, 1990 ; 1st ed. 1918); Harold Nicolson, The Development of English Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1928 ); Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: Norton, 1987 ); and Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984 ). For a post-structuralist approach to biography, see William H. Epstein, ed., Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991 ).

8. James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972 ).

9. Ricia Anne Chansky, “General Introduction,” in The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader , eds. Ricia Anne Chansky and Emily Hipchen (London and New York: Routledge, 2016 ), xx–xxii, quotations at xx and xxi.

10. Sidonie Smith, “Foreword,” in Chansky and Hipchen, The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader , xvii–xix, at xviii.

11. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998 ).

12. See, for example, Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” Modern Language Notes 94, no. 5 (1979) : 919–930; and Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977 ).

13. Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” in On Autobiography , by Philippe Lejeune, trans. Katherine Leary, with a foreword by Paul John Eakin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3–30 (the essay was originally published in French in 1977); Paul John Eakin, Fictions of Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) ; and Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Ithaca, NY: Princeton University Press, 1992) .

14. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) ; and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) .

15. For works by the authors and editors mentioned in this paragraph, see the “Further Reading” section.

16. Margaretta Jolly, ed., Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms , 2 vols. (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001) , quotations at ix and x.

17. Jolly, Encyclopedia , ix, x; and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) .

18. Jolly, Encyclopedia , ix, x.

19. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives , 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) , 2. The first edition was published in 2001; for convenience this article quotes from the second edition.

20. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 3, 4.

21. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 211, citing Smith and Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory .

22. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 211.

23. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 204–205.

24. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 214. The works they mention are: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) ; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) ; and Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) .

25. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 216. They cite John Paul Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) ; and Nancy K. Miller, “Representing Others: Gender and the Subjects of Autobiography,” Differences 6, no. 1 (1994) : 1–27.

26. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 215.

27. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 218.

28. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 234. Their Appendix A is at 253–286.

29. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) , pp. 121–126. There isn’t a citation for Kadar—that’s me saying she would agree with Williams on this. The Williams distinction is a commonplace by now.

30. Kadar, “Coming to Terms,” 10.

31. I have written at some length about this in relation to Renders and De Haan and the Biographers International Organization, with particular attention paid to Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly , which I co-edit; the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Center for Biographical Research, which I direct; and the International Auto/Biography Association-Listserv, which I manage. See Craig Howes, “What Are We Turning From? Research and Ideology in Biography and Life Writing,” in The Biographical Turn: Lives in History , eds. Hans Renders, Binne de Haan, and Jonne Harmsma (London and New York: Routledge, 2016) , 165–175.

32. Hans Renders, “Biography in Academia and the Critical Frontier in Life Writing,” in Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing , eds. Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (Leiden: Brill, 2013) , 169–176, at 169. Michael Holroyd, “Changing fashions in biography,” The Guardian , 6 November 2009 .

33. Renders, “Biography in Academia,” 172.

34. Renders, “Biography in Academia,” 172.

35. For a more detailed account of this suspicion, see Craig Howes, “Ethics and Literary Biography,” in A Companion to Literary Biography , ed. Richard Bradford (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2018) , 123–142. It should be noted that while they may share an aversion to criticism and theory, if anything, literary artists often have a greater contempt for biographers.

36. Julie Rak, Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013) , quotations at 4 and 3; and Julie Rak, ed., “Pop Life,” special issue, Canadian Review of American Studies 38, no. 3 (2008) .

37. Leigh Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017) .

38. Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) ; Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) ; Andrew Brown, A Brief History of Biographies: From Plutarch to Celebs (London: Hesperus, 2011) ; Catherine N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives; Themes and Genres . Twayne's Studies in Literary Themes and Genres (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) ; and Paula R. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) .

39. Carl Rollyson, Biography: An Annotated Bibliography (Pasadena, CA: Salem, 1992) . Among Rollyson’s many other works are: Carl Rollyson, Reading Biography (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2004) ; Carl Rollyson, A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005) ; and Carl Rollyson, Confessions of a Serial Biographer (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2016) .

40. Carl Rollyson, Biography: A User’s Guide (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008) ; and Nigel Hamilton and Hans Renders, The ABC of Modern Biography (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018) .

41. Edel, Writing Lives ; Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002) ; Rollyson, Confessions ; Nigel Hamilton, How To Do Biography: A Primer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) ; and Hamilton, Biography .

42. John Batchelor, ed., The Art of Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) ; Warwick Gould and Thomas F. Staley, eds., Writing the Lives of Writers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) ; Robert Dion and Frédéric Regard, eds., Les nouvelles écritures biographiques (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2013) ; and Richard Bradford, ed., A Companion to Literary Biography (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019) . My essay “Ethics and Literary Biography” appears in Bradford’s collection.

43. Michael Benton, Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) ; Rana Tekcan, Too Far for Comfort: A Study on Biographical Distance (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2015) ; and Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) . She mentions her reservations at 130.

44. Barbara Caine, Biography and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) ; Hans Renders and Binne de Haan, eds., Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (Leiden: Brill, 2013) ; Renders, de Haan, and Harmsma, The Biographical Turn ; and Tanya Evans and Robert Reynolds, “Introduction to this Special Issue on Biography and Life-Writing,” disclosure 21 (2012) : 1–8.

45. Atiba Pertilla and Uwe Spiekermann, eds., “Forum: The Challenge of Biography,” special section, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 55 (2014) ; and Sarah Panter, ed., Mobility and Biography , Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte / European History Yearbook 16 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015) .

46. Tomas Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) ; Stephanos Efthymiadis, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography , vol. 2, Genres and Contexts (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014) ; Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) ; Sarah Mombert and Michèle Rosellini, eds., Usages des vies: Le biographique hier et aujourd’hui (XVIIe–XXIe siècle) (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2012) ; and Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century “Hidden” Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) .

47. Examples of such work include: Robin Humphrey, Robert Miller, and Elena Zdravomyslova, eds., Biographical Research in Eastern Europe: Altered Lives and Broken Biographies (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2003) ; Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir et al., eds., Biography, Gender and History: Nordic Perspectives (Turku: K&H, 2017) ; and Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Toisten elämät: Kirjoituksia elämäkerroista (Avain, 2017) .

48. Wilhelm Hemecker, ed., Die Biographie—Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009) ; Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders, eds., with Gregor Schima, Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018) ; Bernhard Fetz and Wilhelm Hemecker, eds., Theorie der Biographie: Grundlagentexte und Kommentar (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011) ; and Bernhard Fetz, ed., Die Biographie—Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009) . All these except the Hemecker and Saunders volume were published by De Gruyter on behalf of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute.

49. Marta Dvorak, ed., Biographical Creation / La création biographique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires Rennes, 1997) .

50. Susan Tridgell, Understanding Our Selves: The Dangerous Art of Biography (New York: Peter Lang, 2004) ; and Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave, 2020) .

51. Alan C. Elms, Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) ; William Todd Schultz, ed., Handbook of Psychobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) ; and Dan P. McAdams, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) .

52. See, for example, Carolyn L. White, ed., The Materiality of Individuality: Archaeological Studies of Individual Lives (New York: Springer, 2009) ; Ann L. W. Stodder and Ann M. Palkovich, eds., The Bioarchaeology of Individuals (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012) ; Michaela Köttig et al., eds., “Biography and Ethnicity,” special issue, Forum: Qualitative Social Research 10, no. 3 (2009) ; and Sophie Day Carsten and Charles Stafford, eds., “Reason and Passion: The Parallel Worlds of Ethnography and Biography,” special issue, Social Anthropology 26, no. 1 (2018) : 5–14.

53. Alice Te Punga Somerville, Daniel Heath Justice, and Noelani Arista, eds., “Indigenous Conversations about Biography,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2016) : 239–247; Noenoe K. Silva, The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) ; Melanie Unseld, Biographie und Musikgeschichte: Wandlungen biographischer Konzepte in Musikkultur und Musikhistoriographie (Cologne: Böhlau, 2014) ; and Anna Jackson, ed., “The Verse Biography,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39, no. 1 (Winter 2016) .

54. Alice Te Punga Somerville and Daniel Heath Justice, “Introduction: Indigenous Conversations about Biography,” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2016) : 239–247, at 243.

55. Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000) ; Peter Ackroyd, London: The Concise Biography (London: Vintage, 2012) ; Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (London: Granta, 2011) ; and Kaori O’Connor, The English Breakfast: The Biography of a National Meal, with Recipes , rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) .

56. Linda Anderson, Autobiography , 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2010 ; 1st ed. 2001); Laura Marcus, Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) ; Chansky and Hipchen, The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader ; and Kate Douglas and Ashley Barnwell, eds., Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies (London: Routledge, 2019) .

57. Carole Allamand, Le “Pacte” de Philippe Lejeune; ou, L’autobiographie en théorie (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2018) ; Lia Nicole Brozgal, Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018) ; Kathleen Ashley, et al., eds., Autobiography and Postmodernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995) ; G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg, eds., True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern (Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1998) ; and Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir, Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003) .

58. For examples of such historical and geographical investigations, see Carsten Heinze and Alfred Hornung, eds., Medialisierungsformen des (Auto-) Biografischen (Konstanz: UVK, 2013) ; Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly, eds., Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006) ; Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly, Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation, 1500–1660 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2007) ; and Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf Dekker, and Michael Mascuch, eds., Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments in Autobiographical Writing since the Sixteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2011) .

59. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of African-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); and William L. Andrews, Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony , 1840–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) .

60. Rachel McLennan, American Autobiography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) . Georges Gusdorf “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” pp. 28–48.

61. Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories ; Paul John Eakin, Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008) ; and Richard Freadman, Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) .

62. Liz Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) ; Laura Marcus, Auto/Biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) ; Trev Broughton and Linda Anderson, eds., Women’s Lives/Women’s Times: New Essays on Auto/Biography (New York: SUNY Press, 1997) ; Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life-Writing , trans. Eric Prenowitz (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) ; and Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1998) .

63. Florence S. Boos, Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women: The Hard Way Up , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) ; Laura J. Beard, Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women’s Autobiographical Writings in the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009) ; Marilyn Booth, ed., “Women’s Autobiography in South Asia and the Middle East,” special issue, Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 2 (2013) ; Kathryn Abrams and Irene Kacandes, eds., “Witness,” special issue, Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, nos. 1–2 (2008) : 13–27; Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) ; and Gilmore, Tainted Witness .

64. Cynthia Franklin and Laura E. Lyons, eds., “Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2004) ; Marlene Kadar et al., eds., Tracing the Autobiographical (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005) ; Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma, Testimony, Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000) ; and Paul Atkinson and Anna Poletti, eds., “The Limits of Testimony,” special issue, Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture 40, no. 3 (2008) .

65. G. Thomas Couser, Memoir: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) ; Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History (New York: Riverhead Penguin, 2009) ; and Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph, eds., Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir (London and New York: Routledge, 2018) .

66. Philippe Lejeune, On Diary , trans. Kathy Durnin, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009) ; Lejeune, On Autobiography ; Françoise Simonet-Tenant, Le journal intime: Genre littéraire et écriture ordinaire (Paris: Téraèdre, 2004) ; and Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, eds., Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996) .

67. Kadar, “Coming to Terms.”

68. Zachary Leader, ed., On Life-Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) ; Richard Bradford, ed., Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) ; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader (Ann Arbor: Maize Books, 2017) ; Liz Stanley, ed., Documents of Life Revisited: Narrative and Biographical Methodology for a 21st Century Critical Humanism (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013) ; Liz Stanley, ed., “In Dialogue: Life Writing and Narrative Inquiry,” special issue, Life Writing 7, no. 1 (2010) : 1–3; and James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) .

69. Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes, eds., Teaching Life Writing Texts , Options for Teaching (New York: Modern Language Association, 2008) ; Laurie McNeill and Kate Douglas, eds., “Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives,” special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32, no. 1 (2016) ; Laurie McNeill and Kate Douglas, eds., Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives (London and New York: Routledge, 2018 ); Dennis Kersten and Anne Marie Mreijen, eds., “Teaching Life Writing Texts in Europe,” special section, European Journal of Life Writing 4 (2015) ; and Dennis Kersten, Anne Marie Mreijen, and Yvonne Delhey, eds., “Teaching Life Writing Texts in Europe, Part II,” special section, European Journal of Life Writing 7 (2018) .

70. Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2018) ; Karen A. Winstead, The Oxford History of Life-Writing , vol. 1, The Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) ; Alan Stewart, The Oxford History of Life-Writing , vol. 2, Early Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) ; David Amigoni, ed., Life Writing and Victorian Culture (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2006) ; Andrew Tate, ed., “Victorian Life Writing,” special issue, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28, no. 1 (2006) : 1–3; and Lynn M. Linder, ed., “Co-Constructed Selves: Nineteenth-Century Collaborative Life Writing,” special issue, Modern Language Studies 52, no. 2 (2016) : 121–129.

71. Danielle Boillet, Marie-Madeleine Fragonard, and Hélène Tropé, eds., Écrire des vies: Espagne, France, Italie, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2012) ; and Birgit Dahlke, Dennis Tate, and Roger Woods, eds., German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010) .

72. Cynthia Huff, ed., “Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities,” special issue, Prose Studies 26, nos. 1–2 (2003) ; Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone, eds., Writing Medieval Women’s Lives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 ); Julie A. Eckerle, Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013) ; Julie A. Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey, eds., Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland , Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019) ; Daniel Cook and Amy Culley, eds., Women’s Life Writing , 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) ; and Amy Culley, British Women’s Life Writing , 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) .

73. Susan Civale, Romantic Women’s Life Writing: Reputation and Afterlife (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019) ; Alexis Wolf, “Introduction: Reading Silence in the Long Nineteenth-Century Women’s Life Writing Archive,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 27 (2018) : unpaginated; Valérie Baisnée-Keay et al., eds., Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading: She Reads to Write Herself , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) ; and Margaretta Jolly, In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) .

74. Eric D. Lamore, ed., “African American Life Writing,” special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 27, no. 1 (2012) ; Viola Amato, Intersex Narratives: Shifts in the Representation of Intersex Lives in North American Literature and Popular Culture (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016) ; and Katherine Adams, Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women’s Life Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) .

75. Marijke Huisman et al., eds., Life Writing Matters in Europe , American Studies Monograph 217 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012) ; Simona Mitroiu, ed., Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) ; and Iona Luca and Leena Kurvet-Käosaar, eds., “Life Writing Trajectories in Post-1989 Eastern Europe,” special section, European Journal of Life Writing 2 (2013) : T1–9.

76. Oliver Nyambi, Life-Writing from the Margins in Zimbabwe: Versions and Subversions of Crisis (London and New York: Routledge, 2019) ; David McCooey, Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) ; Jack Bowers, Strangers at Home: Place, Belonging, and Australian Life Writing (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2016) ; Brij V. Lal and Peter Hempenstall, eds., Pacific Lives, Pacific Places: Bursting Boundaries in Pacific History (Canberra: Journal of Pacific History, 2001) ; Jack Corbett and Brij V. Lal, eds., Political Life Writing in the Pacific: Reflections on Practice (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2015) ; and Roxanna Waterson, ed., Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Narratives and Historical Experience (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007) .

77. Hephzibah Israel and John Zavos, “Narratives of Transformation: Religious Conversion and Indian Traditions of ‘Life Writing,’” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41, no. 2 (2018) : 352–365; S. Shankar and Charu Gupta, “Caste and Life Narratives,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2017) ; and Maureen Perkins, ed., Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2012) . My own essay on Martin Amis appears in this last collection.

78. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation (London and New York: Routledge, 2009) ; Philip Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) ; Gillian Whitlock, Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) ; Suzanne Scafe and Jenni Ramone, eds., “Women’s Life Writing and Diaspora,” special issue, Life Writing 10, no. 1 (2013) : 1–3; Rocío G. Davis, Jaume Aurell, and Ana Beatriz Delgado, eds., Ethnic Life Writing and Histories: Genres, Performance, and Culture (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007) ; and Rosalia Baena, ed., Transculturing Auto/Biography: Forms of Life Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) .

79. Clare Brant and Max Saunders, eds., “The Work of Life Writing,” special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 25, no. 2 (2010) ; Paul John Eakin, ed., The Ethics of Life Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004) ; David Parker, The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007) ; D. L. LeMahieu and Christopher Cowley, eds., “Philosophy and Life Writing,” special issue, Life Writing 15, no. 3 (2018) : 301–303; Rocío G. Davis, ed., “Life Writing as Empathy,” special issue, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 42, no. 2 (2016) ; and Joan Ramon Resina, ed., Inscribed Identities: Life Writing as Self-Realization (London and New York: Routledge, 2019) .

80. G. Thomas Couser, Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997) ; G. Thomas Couser, Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) ; G. Thomas Couser, Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009) ; G. Thomas Couser, ed., “Disability and Life Writing,” special issue, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 5, no. 3 (2011) ; G. Thomas Couser, ed., Body Language: Narrating Illness and Disability (London and New York: Routledge, 2019) ; and G. Thomas Couser and Susannah Mintz, eds., Disability Experiences: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Other Personal Narratives , 2 vols. (Detroit: St. James Press, 2019) .

81. Suzette A. Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) ; Susanna Egan, Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) ; Miriam Fuchs, The Text is Myself: Women’s Life Writing and Catastrophe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) ; Gilian Whitlock and Kate Douglas, eds., Trauma Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 2015) , first published as “Trauma in the Twenty-First Century,” Life Writing 5, no. 1 (2008); and Gabriele Rippl et al., eds., Haunted Narratives: Life Writing in an Age of Trauma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013) .

82. Meg Jensen, The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truths , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave, 2019) , quotation at 8; and Mita Banerjee, Medical Humanities in American Studies: Life Writing, Narrative Medicine, and the Power of Autobiography , American Studies Series 292 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018) .

83. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (London: Palgrave, 2004) ; Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly, eds., We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) ; Katja Kurz, Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014) ; Melissa Dearey, Radicalization: The Life Writings of Political Prisoners (London and New York: Routledge, 2010) ; and Brittney Cooper and Treva B. Lindsey, eds., “M4BL and the Critical Matter of Black Lives,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 41, no. 4 (2018) : 731–740.

84. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) ; and Timonthy Dow Adams, Light Writing & Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) .

85. Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, eds., “Autographics,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2008) ; Hillary L. Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) ; and Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016) .

86. Michael A. Chaney, Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2017) ; Michael A. Chaney, ed., Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011) ; Elisabeth El Refaie, Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012) ; and Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley, eds., Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016) .

87. Anna Poletti, Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008) ; Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) ; Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018) ; and Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall, Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019) .

88. David McCooey and Maria Takolander, eds., “The Limits of Life Writing,” special issue, Life Writing 14, no. 3 (2017) ; David McCooey and Maria Takolander, eds., The Limits of Life Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2018) ; Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser, eds., “(Post)Human Lives,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2012) ; Purnima Bose and Laura E. Lyons, eds., “Life Writing and Corporate Personhood,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2014) ; and Alfred Hornung and Zhao Baisheng, eds., Ecology and Life Writing (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013) .

89. John Zuern, ed., “Online Lives,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2003) ; Laurie McNeill and John Zuern, eds., “Online Lives 2.0,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2015) ; and Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, eds., Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online (Madison: University of Wisonsin Press, 2014) .

90. Emma Maguire, Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave, 2018) ; and Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti, Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) .

91. George F. Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992) ; Glenn Man, ed., “The Biopic,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2000) ; William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer, eds., Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: The Biopic and American National Identity (New York: SUNY Press, 2016) ; Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010) ; and Tom Brown and Belén Vidal, eds., The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture , AFI Film Readers (London and New York: Routledge, 2014) .

92. Ryan Claycomb, Lives in Play: Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012) ; Victoria Kuttainen and Lindsay Simpson, eds., “Performing Lives,” special issue, LiNQ: Connected Writing and Scholarship 39, no. 1 (2012) , quotation from the editors’ “Introduction: Performing Lives,” 11–14, at 11; Clara Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) ; Daniel Herwitz, The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) ; and Katja Lee and Lorraine York, eds., Celebrity Cultures in Canada (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016) .

93. Max Saunders, Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) ; Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir, Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) ; Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction , 3 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019) ; Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Cynthia M. Chambers, and Carl Leggo, Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos of Our Times (New York: Peter Lang, 2009) ; Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak, eds., Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) ; Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Catherine Viollet, eds., Genèse et autofiction (Paris: Academia-Bruylant, 2007) ; and Helena Grice, Asian American Fiction, History, and Life Writing: International Encounters (London and New York: Routledge, 2009) .

94. Michael Lackey, The American Biographical Novel (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) ; Michael Lackey, Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) ; Michael Lackey, Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) ; Michael Lackey, Biographical Fiction: A Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) ; Michael Lackey, Biofictional Histories, Mutations, and Forms (London and New York: Routledge, 2016) ; and Michael Lackey, ed., “Biofictions,” special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016) .

95. Susanna Egan, Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011) ; and Nancy K. Miller, “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir,” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007) : 537–548.

96. Kadar, “Coming to Terms.”

97. Lauren Berlant and Jay Prosser, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant,” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2011) : 180–187, at 183.

98. Berlant and Prosser, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics,” 182.

99. Berlant and Prosser, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics,” 181.

100. Marlen Kadar, “The Devouring: Traces of Roma in the Holocaust; No Tattoo, Sterilized Body, Gypsy Girl,” in Kadar et al., Tracing the Autobiographical , 223–246, at 223–224.

101. Kadar, “The Devouring,” 243. On the fragment as “an unfinished separation” Kadar is citing Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster , trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) .

102. Kadar, “The Devouring,” 226.

103. Kadar, “Whose Life Is It Anyway?,” quotations at 153.

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Life’s Stories

How you arrange the plot points of your life into a narrative can shape who you are—and is a fundamental part of being human.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       

In Paul Murray’s novel Skippy Dies, there’s a point where the main character, Howard, has an existential crisis. “‘It’s just not how I expected my life would be,’” he says.

“‘What did you expect?’” a friend responds.

“Howard ponders this. ‘I suppose—this sounds stupid, but I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc .’”

But it’s not stupid at all. Though perhaps the facts of someone’s life, presented end to end, wouldn’t much resemble a narrative to the outside observer, the way people choose to tell the stories of their lives, to others and—crucially—to themselves, almost always does have a narrative arc. In telling the story of how you became who you are, and of who you’re on your way to becoming, the story itself becomes a part of who you are.

“Life stories do not simply reflect personality. They are personality, or more accurately, they are important parts of personality, along with other parts, like dispositional traits, goals, and values,” writes Dan McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, along with Erika Manczak, in a chapter for the APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology.

In the realm of narrative psychology, a person’s life story is not a Wikipedia biography of the facts and events of a life, but rather the way a person integrates those facts and events internally—picks them apart and weaves them back together to make meaning. This narrative becomes a form of identity, in which the things someone chooses to include in the story, and the way she tells it, can both reflect and shape who she is.  A life story doesn’t just say what happened, it says why it was important, what it means for who the person is, for who they’ll become, and for what happens next.

“Sometimes in cases of extreme autism, people don’t construct a narrative structure for their lives,” says Jonathan Adler, an assistant professor of psychology at Olin College of Engineering, “but the default mode of human cognition is a narrative mode.”

When people tell others about themselves, they kind of have to do it in a narrative way—that’s just how humans communicate. But when people think about their lives to themselves, is it always in a narrative way, with a plot that leads from one point to another? There’s an old adage that everyone has a book inside of them. (Christopher Hitchens once said that inside is “exactly where I think it should, in most cases, remain.” ) Is there anyone out there with a life story that’s not a story at all, but some other kind of more disjointed, avant-garde representation of their existence?

“This is an almost impossible question to address from a scientific approach,” says Monisha Pasupathi, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Utah.  Even if we are, as the writer Jonathan Gottschall put it, “storytelling animals,” what does that mean from one person to the next? Not only are there individual differences in how people think of their stories, there’s huge variation in the degree to which they engage in narrative storytelling in the first place.

“Some people write in their diaries and are very introspective, and some people are not at all,” says Kate McLean, an associate professor of psychology at Western Washington University. Journal-keeping, though a way of documenting the life story, doesn’t always make for a tightly-wound narrative. A writer I interviewed several months ago—Sarah Manguso—has kept a diary for 25 years, and still told me, “Narrative is not a mode that has ever come easily to me.”

Nevertheless, the researchers I spoke with were all convinced that even if it’s not 100 percent universal to see life as a story, it’s at least extremely common.

“I think normal, healthy adults have in common that they can all produce a life story,” Pasupathi says. “They can all put one together … In order to have relationships, we’ve all had to tell little pieces of our story. And so it’s hard to be a human being and have relationships without having some version of a life story floating around.”

But life rarely follows the logical progression that most stories—good stories—do, where the clues come together, guns left on mantles go off at the appropriate moments, the climax comes in the third act. So narrative seems like an incongruous framing method for life’s chaos, until you remember where stories came from in the first place. Ultimately, the only material we’ve ever had to make stories out of is our own imagination, and life itself.

Storytelling, then—fictional or nonfictional, realistic or embellished with dragons—is a way of making sense of the world around us.

“Life is incredibly complex, there are lots of things going on in our environment and in our lives at all times, and in order to hold onto our experience, we need to make meaning out of it,” Adler says. “The way we do that is by structuring our lives into stories.”

It’s hardly a simple undertaking. People contain multitudes, and by multitudes, I mean libraries. Someone might have an overarching narrative for her whole life, and different narratives for different realms of her life—career, romance, family, faith. She might have narratives within each realm that intersect, diverge, or contradict each other, all of them filled with the microstories of specific events. And to truly make a life story, she’ll need to do what researchers call “autobiographical reasoning” about the events—“identifying lessons learned or insights gained in life experiences, marking development or growth through sequences of scenes, and showing how specific life episodes illustrate enduring truths about the self,” McAdams and Manczak write.

“Stories don’t have to be really simple, like fairy-tale-type narratives,” McAdams says. “They can be complicated. It can be like James Joyce out there.”

If you really like James Joyce, it might be a lot like James Joyce. People take the stories that surround them—fictional tales, news articles, apocryphal family anecdotes—then identify with them and borrow from them while fashioning their own self-conceptions. It’s a Möbius strip: Stories are life, life is stories.

People aren’t writing their life stories from  birth, though. The ability to create a life narrative takes a little while to come online—the development process gives priority to things like walking, talking, and object permanence. Young children can tell stories about isolated events, with guidance, and much of adolescence is dedicated to learning “what goes in a story … and what makes a good story in the first place,” Pasupathi says. “I don’t know how much time you’ve spent around little kids, but they really don’t understand that. I have a child who can really take an hour to tell you about Minecraft .” Through friends, family, and fiction, children learn what others consider to be good storytelling—and that being able to spin a good yarn has social value.

It’s in the late teens and early years of adulthood that story construction really picks up—because by then people have developed some of the cognitive tools they need to create a coherent life story. These include causal coherence—the ability to describe how one event led to another—and thematic coherence—the ability to identify overarching values and motifs that recur throughout the story. In a study analyzing the life stories of 8-, 12-, 16-, and 20-year-olds, these kinds of coherence were found to increase with age. As the life story enters its last chapters, it may become more set in stone. In one study by McLean , older adults had more thematic coherence, and told more stories about stability, while young adults tended to tell more stories about change.

McAdams conceives of this development as the layering of three aspects of the self. Pretty much from birth, people are “actors.” They have personality traits, they interact with the world, they have roles to play—daughter, sister, the neighbor’s new baby that cries all night and keeps you up. When they get old enough to have goals, they become “agents” too—still playing their roles and interacting with the world, but making decisions with the hopes of producing desired outcomes. And the final layer is “author,” when people begin to bundle ideas about the future with experiences from the past and present to form a narrative self.

This developmental trajectory could also explain why people enjoy different types of fictional stories at different ages. “When you’re a kid, it’s mostly about plot,” McAdams says. “This happens and this happens. You’re not tuned into the idea that a character develops.” Thus, perhaps, the appeal of cartoon characters who never get older.

Recently, McAdams says, his book club read Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. “I read it in high school and hated it,” he says. “All I could remember about it was that this sled hits a tree. And we read it recently in the club, and whoa, is it fabulous. A sled does hit the tree, there’s no doubt that is a big scene, but how it changes these people’s lives and the tragedy of this whole thing, it’s completely lost on 18-year-olds. Things are lost on 8-year-olds that a 40-year-old picks up, and things that an 8-year-old found compelling and interesting will just bore a 40-year-old to tears sometimes.”

And like personal taste in books or movies, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are influenced by more than just, well, ourselves. The way people recount experiences to others seems to shape the way they end up remembering those events. According to Pasupathi’s research, this happens in a couple of ways. One is that people tailor the stories they tell to their audiences and the context. (For example, I tell the story of the time I crashed my mom’s car much differently now, to friends, than the way I told it to my mom at the time. Much less crying.)

The other is that the act of telling is a rehearsal of the story, Pasupathi says. “And rehearsal strengthens connections between some pieces of information in your mind and diminishes connections between others. So the things I tell you become more accessible to me and more memorable to me. Those can be pretty lasting effects.” So when people drop the cheesy pick-up line “What’s your story?” at a bar, like a man who nicks his carotid artery while shaving, they’ve accidentally hit upon something vital.

But just as there are consequences to telling, there are consequences to not telling . If someone is afraid of how people might react to a story, and they keep it to themselves, they’ll likely miss out on the enrichment that comes with a back-and-forth conversation. A listener “may give you other things to think about, or may acknowledge that this thing you thought was really bad is actually not a big deal, so you get this richer and more elaborated memory,” Pasupathi says. If you don’t tell, “your memory for that event may be less flexible and give you less chance for growth.” This is basically the premise of talk therapy.

And all of this doesn’t even account for all the conversations you plan to have, or elaborately imagine having and never have. The path from outside to inside and back out is winding, dark, and full of switchbacks.

Once certain stories get embedded into the culture, they become master narratives—blueprints for people to follow when structuring their own stories, for better or worse. One such blueprint is your standard “go to school, graduate, get a job, get married, have kids.”

That can be a helpful script in that it gives children a sense of the arc of a life, and shows them examples of tentpole events that could happen. But the downsides of standard narratives have been well-documented—they stigmatize anyone who doesn’t follow them to a T, and provide unrealistic expectations of happiness for those who do. If this approach were a blueprint for an IKEA desk instead of a life, almost everyone trying to follow it would end up with something wobbly and misshapen, with a few leftover bolts you find under the couch, boding ill for the structural integrity of the thing you built.

“I think that’s a particularly pernicious frame for people who become parents,” Pasupathi says. “That’s a narrative where the pinnacle is to get married and have kids and then everything will be sort of flatly happy from then on.”

And these scripts evolve as culture evolves. For example, in centuries past, stories of being possessed by demons might not have been out of place, but it’s unlikely most people would describe their actions in those terms nowadays.

Other common narrative structures seen in many cultures today are redemption sequences and contamination sequences. A redemption story starts off bad and ends better—“That horrible vacation ultimately brought us closer as a family”—while a contamination story does the opposite—“The cruise was amazing until we all got food poisoning.” Having redemption themes in one’s life story is generally associated with greater well-being, while contamination themes tend to coincide with poorer mental health.

Many people have some smaller stories of each type sprinkled throughout their greater life story, though a person’s disposition, culture, and environment can influence which they gravitate to. People can also see the larger arc of their lives as redemptive or contaminated, and redemption in particular is a popular, and particularly American, narrative. “Evolving from the Puritans to Ralph Waldo Emerson to Oprah Winfrey … Americans have sought to author their lives as redemptive tales of atonement, emancipation, recovery, self-fulfillment, and upward social mobility,” McAdams writes in an overview of life-story research . “The stories speak of heroic individual protagonists—the chosen people—whose manifest destiny is to make a positive difference in a dangerous world, even when the world does not wish to be redeemed.”

The redemption story is American optimism—things will get better!—and American exceptionalism—I can make things better!—and it’s in the water, in the air, and in our heads. This is actually a good thing a lot of the time. Studies have shown that finding a positive meaning in negative events is linked to a more complex sense of self and greater life satisfaction. And even controlling for general optimism, McAdams and his colleagues found that having more redemption sequences in a life story was still associated with higher well-being.

The trouble comes when redemption isn’t possible. The redemptive American tale is one of privilege, and for those who can’t control their circumstances, and have little reason to believe things will get better, it can be an illogical and unattainable choice. There are things that happen to people that cannot be redeemed.

It can be hard to share a story when it amounts to: “This happened, and it was terrible. The end.” In research McLean did, in which she asked people who’d had near-death experiences to tell their stories to others, “the people who told these unresolved stories had really negative responses,” she says. If there wasn’t some kind of uplifting, redemptive end to the story (beyond just the fact that they survived), “The listeners did not like that.

“The redemptive story is really valued in America, because for a lot of people it’s a great way to tell stories, but for people who just can’t do that, who can’t redeem their traumas for whatever reason, they’re sort of in a double bind,” she continues. “They both have this crappy story that’s hanging on, but they also can’t tell it and get acceptance or validation from people.”

In cases like this, for people who have gone through a lot of trauma, it might be better for them not to autobiographically reason about it at all.

“The first time I ever found this association, of reasoning associated with poor mental health, I thought that I had analyzed my data incorrectly,” McLean says. But after other researchers replicated her findings, she got more confident that something was going on. She thinks that people may repress traumatic events in a way that, while not ideal, is still “healthy enough.”

“The typical idea is that you can repress something but it’s going to come back and bite you if you don’t deal with it,” she says. “But that’s still under the assumption that people have the resources to deal with it.”

In one study, McLean and her colleagues interviewed adolescents attending a high school for vulnerable students. One subject, Josie, the 17-year-old daughter of a single mother, suffered from drug and alcohol abuse, bipolar disorder, rape, and a suicide attempt. She told the researchers that her self-defining memory was that her mother had promised not to have more children and then broke that promise.

“I’m the only person that I can rely on in my life because I’ve tried to rely on other people and I either get stabbed in the back or hurt, so I really know that I can only trust myself and rely on myself,” Josie said when recounting this memory.

“That’s pretty intensive reasoning,” McLean says. “So that’s meaningful in understanding who you are, but it doesn’t really give you a positive view of who you are. It may be true in the moment, but it’s not something that propels someone towards growth.”

It’s possible to over-reason about good things in your life as well. “There’s been some experimental research that shows that when people are asked to reflect on positive experiences, it makes them feel worse, because you’re like ‘Oh, why did I marry that person?’” McLean says. “Wisdom and maturity and cognitive complexity are all things that we value, but they don’t necessarily make you happy.”

Though sometimes autobiographical reasoning can lead to dark thoughts, other times it can help people find meaning. And while you may be able to avoid reasoning about a certain event, it would be pretty hard to leave all the pages of a life story unwritten.

“I think the act of framing our lives as a narrative is neither positive nor negative, it just is,” Adler says. “That said, there are better and worse ways of doing that narrative process for our mental health.”

In his research, Adler has noticed two themes in people’s stories that tend to correlate with better well-being: agency, or feeling like you are in control of your life, and communion, or feeling like you have good relationships in your life. The connection is “a little fuzzier” with communion, Adler says—there’s a strong relationship between communion and well-being at the same moment; it’s less clear if feeling communion now predicts well-being later.

But agency sure does. It makes sense, because feelings of helplessness and hopelessness are classic symptoms of depression, that feeling in control would be good for mental health. Adler did a longitudinal study of 47 adults undergoing therapy, having them write personal narratives and complete mental-health assessments over the course of 12 therapy sessions. What he found was not only that themes of agency in participants’ stories increased over time and that mental health increased, and that the two were related, but that increased agency actually appeared in stories before people’s mental health improved.

“It’s sort of like people put out a new version of themselves and lived their way into it,” Adler says.

(There’s something about the narrative form, specifically—while expressing thoughts and feelings about negative events seems to help people’s well-being, one study found that writing them in a narrative form helped more than just listing them.)

But, he continues, “I’m not like Mr. Agency, agency at all costs. I don’t believe that. If you have Stage 4 cancer, agency may be good for you, but is it a rational choice? And I do think [redemption] is good in the long term, but in the throes of really struggling with illness, I don’t know that it actually helps people.”

But I wondered: Though agency may be good for you, does seeing yourself as a strong protagonist come at a cost to the other characters in your story? Are there implications for empathy if we see other people as bit players instead of protagonists in their own right?

“That’s actually kind of an interesting empirical idea,” Pasupathi says. “I don’t know that anybody’s looking at that.”

As Adler’s work shows, people need to see themselves as actors to a certain degree. And Pasupathi’s work shows that other people play a big role in shaping life stories. The question, perhaps, is how much people recognize that their agency is not absolute.

According to one study, highly generative people—that is, people who are caring and committed to helping future generations— often tell stories about others who helped them in the past. McAdams suggests that narcissists are probably more likely to do the opposite—“People [who] are really good at talking about themselves and pushing their own narrative, but they’re not willing to listen to yours.”

“If our stories are about us as triumphant agents going through life and overcoming, and they underplay the role of other people and the role of institutional support in helping us do those things, we are likely to be less good at recognizing how other people’s lives are constrained by institutions and other people,” Pasupathi says. “I think that has real implications for how we think about inequity in our society. The more the whole world is designed to work for you, the less you are aware that it is working for you.”

It’s a dizzying problem: People use stories to make sense of life, but how much do those stories reflect life’s realities? Even allowing for the fact that people are capable of complex Joyce-ian storytelling, biases, personality differences, or emotions can lead different people to see the same event differently. And considering how susceptible humans are to false memories, who’s to say that the plot points in someone’s life story really happened, or happened the way she thought they did, or really caused the effects she saw from them?

Pasupathi’s not convinced that it matters that much whether life stories are perfectly accurate. A lot of false-memory research has to do with eyewitness testimony , where it matters a whole lot whether a person is telling a story precisely as it happened. But for narrative-psychology researchers, “What really matters isn’t so much whether it’s true in the forensic sense, in the legal sense,” she says. “What really matters is whether people are making something meaningful and coherent out of what happened. Any creation of a narrative is a bit of a lie. And some lies have enough truth.”

Organizing the past into a narrative isn’t a way just to understand the self but also to attempt to predict the future. Which is interesting, because the storytelling device that seems most incompatible with the realities of actual life is foreshadowing. Metaphors, sure. As college literature-class discussion sections taught me, you can see anything as a metaphor if you try hard enough. Motifs, definitely. Even if you’re living your life as randomly as possible, enough things will happen that, like monkeys with typewriters, patterns will start to emerge.

But no matter how hard you try, no matter how badly you want to, there is no way to truly know the future, and the world isn’t really organizing itself to give you hints. If you’re prone to overthinking, and playing out every possible scenario in your head in advance, you can see foreshadowing in everything. The look your partner gives you means a fight is on the horizon, that compliment from your boss means you’re on track for a promotion, all the little things you’ve forgotten over the years mean you’re definitely going to get dementia when you’re old.

“Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere,” E.M. Forster once wrote. These become obvious in the keeping of a diary: “Imagine a biography that includes not just a narrative but also all the events that failed to foreshadow,” Manguso writes in Ongoingness, the book about her 25-year diary . “ Most of what the diary includes foreshadows nothing.”

So what to do, then, with all the things that don’t fit tidily? There is evidence that finding some “unity” in your narrative identity is better, psychologically, than not finding it. And it probably is easier to just drop those things as you pull patterns from the chaos, though it may take some readjusting.

But Pasupathi rejects that. “I would want to see people do a good job of not trying to leave stuff out because they can’t make it fit,” she says. “We’re not trying to make pieces of your life go away.”

And so even with the dead ends and wrong turns, people can’t stop themselves. “We try to predict the future all the time,” Pasupathi says. She speculates that the reason there’s foreshadowing in fiction in the first place is because of this human tendency. The uncertainty of the future makes people uncomfortable , and stories are a way to deal with that.

“The future is never a direct replica of the past,” Adler says. “So we need to be able to take pieces of things that have happened to us and reconfigure them into possible futures.” For example, through experience, one learns that “We need to talk” rarely foreshadows anything good. (Life has its own clichés.)

There’s been some brain research supporting this link between the past and the future, showing that the same regions of the brain are activated when people are asked to remember something and when they’re asked to imagine an event that hasn’t happened yet. On the flip side, a patient with severe amnesia also had trouble imagining the future.

Similarly, the way someone imagines his future seems to affect the way he sees his past, at the same time as his past informs what he expects for the future.

“If you’re planning to be a doctor, and you’re a 25-year-old starting medical school, and you have expectations about what the next five to 10 years are going to be like, you’ve probably construed a narrative from your past that helps you understand how you got to this point,” McAdams says. “Then, say, you get into med school and you hate it and you drop out, you probably at the same time are going to change your past. You rewrite the history.”

A life story is written in chalk, not ink, and it can be changed. “You’re both the narrator and the main character of your story,” Adler says. “That can sometimes be a revelation—‘Oh, I’m not just living out this story; I am actually in charge of this story.’”

Whether it’s with the help of therapy, in the midst of an identity crisis, when you’ve been chasing a roadrunner of foreshadowing toward a tunnel that turns out to be painted on a wall, or slowly, methodically, day by day—like with all stories, there’s power in rewriting.

“The past is always up for grabs,” McAdams says.

How to Write a Biography in 8 Steps (The Non-Boring Way!)

Compelling biographies help us better connect with others while fostering empathy and understanding. Discover the steps to write one that captivates your audience!

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Have you ever been captivated by someone’s life story? From the ancient tales of great conquerors to the modern accounts of influential figures, biographies have enchanted readers and viewers for centuries. 

The stories of real people’s lives not only entertain and educate but also provide a unique window into the human experience. In fact, according to research 1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8796048/ , human stories like biographies can help us better connect with others while fostering empathy and understanding.

In this article, let’s dive into how to write a compelling biography, from the research phase to delivery.

What Are the Key Elements of a Biography?

The key elements of a well-written biography bring characters to life. They include thorough research, relevant interviews, clear structure, captivating prose, compelling themes, and a balance between objectivity and empathy. 

• Thorough research: Helps create an accurate portrayal of your subject
• Relevant interviews: Insights help provide a deeper understanding of your subject
• Clear structure: Helps you outline your ideas for a compelling narrative
• Captivating prose: Provides descriptive language to paint a picture of your subject
• Compelling themes: Showcases the motivations and desires behind your subject
• A balance between objectivity and empathy: Keeps biases in check and allows your subject to shine for who they are

As you develop your biography, remember that these stories hold an enduring appeal because they offer people an opportunity to explore the depths of the human psyche, unravel extraordinary accomplishments, and discover the vulnerabilities and triumphs of individuals who have left their mark on the world. 

Here are the topics a biography typically covers:

• Early life and background : Provide context about the subject’s upbringing, family, and cultural influences.
• Achievements and milestones: Highlight notable accomplishments, contributions, and significant events throughout their life.
• Challenges and struggles: Explore the obstacles they faced, the lessons learned, and how they overcame adversity.
• Personal characteristics: Describe their personality traits, values, beliefs, and motivations that shaped their actions and decisions.
• Impact and legacy: Discuss the lasting influence and contributions of the subject, both during their lifetime and beyond.

Ready to start crafting your biography? Find greater success with this helpful goal-setting resource!

How To Set Better Goals Using Science

Do you set the same goals over and over again? If you’re not achieving your goals – it’s not your fault! Let me show you the science-based goal-setting framework to help you achieve your biggest goals.

Let’s look at the six key elements of a well-written biography more closely and the steps you can follow to develop your own.

How to Write a Biography in 8 Steps Using Key Elements

Choose your presentation format.

Presenting your biography can take on various forms, the most traditional being written form. The basis for this article assumes you’re writing a conventional biography; however, this foundation can also help you create a multimedia presentation or website as well. 

Consider these various formats to present your biography:

• Traditional Written Biographies: This classic approach provides a comprehensive account of a person’s life through the written word. Traditional biographies can be published in print or ebooks , allowing readers to engage deeply with the subject’s story.
• Multimedia Presentations: In the digital age, multimedia presentations offer a dynamic way to present biographies. Incorporate audio, video, photographs, and interactive elements to enhance the audience’s experience.
• Online Platforms: Online platforms, such as blogs or dedicated biography websites, provide accessible avenues for sharing biographies. They allow for easy updates, reader engagement, and the incorporation of multimedia elements. 

Choose your subject and conduct research

To create a vivid and accurate portrayal of a person’s life, conduct extensive research. Dive into archives, read letters, examine diaries, explore photographs, and immerse yourself in the historical and cultural context surrounding your subject. This will help you unearth the small details that breathe life into your biography. 

Whether you’re writing a biography about a historical figure, contemporary icon, or everyday individual, you’ll want to consider the different factors to focus on. Here are some examples of three types of individuals and the kind of research that will be most helpful.

• Historical Figures: When writing about historical figures, immerse yourself in their era. Understand the social, political, and cultural forces that shaped their lives. I recommend visiting your local library and connecting with a research librarian for support. Otherwise, other tools for historical research include Google Scholar. Analyze primary sources and multiple perspectives to present a well-rounded account.
• Contemporary Icons: Biographies of modern icons offer a chance to delve into their ongoing impact. Conduct interviews or gather insights from their close associates to understand their present-day influence. Stay current with the latest developments, and be prepared to update your work as the subject’s story unfolds.
• Everyday Individuals: Biographies need not be reserved for the famous. Every day individuals possess stories that can be just as compelling. Uncover the extraordinary within the ordinary, highlighting the struggles, triumphs, and personal growth of individuals who might otherwise remain unsung.
• Yourself! Want to write a biography on yourself? Autobiographies are a great way to explore who you are. Get ready to do some serious self-reflection with the steps below.

Pro Tip: Compile your research digitally using helpful cloud filings systems like Google Drive , OneDrive , or Dropbox . Organize your files by category, including information about their youth, family, achievements, and life lessons. You may also choose to write down research references or collect paper clippings on note cards, categorizing your physical files of research along the way.

Develop compelling themes and motifs 

Identify overarching themes or motifs that emerge from the subject’s life. These could be resilience, ambition, love, or societal change. Weave these elements into the narrative, highlighting their significance and impact on the person’s journey. Here are some examples:

• Overcoming Adversity: These biographies feature perseverance, resilience, and determination. Examples include Helen Keller, Nelson Mandela, and Malala Yousafzai.
• Pursuit of Excellence: These biographies highlight people who have worked tirelessly to achieve their goals. Examples include Steve Jobs, Serena Williams, and Michael Jordan.
• Quest for Knowledge: These biographies focus on the curiosity that led to significant contributions to our world. Examples include Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Charles Darwin.
• Personal Transformation: These biographies explore a change in beliefs, values, or priorities. Examples include Malcolm X, Oprah Winfrey, and Maya Angelou.
• Legacy and Impact: These biographies examine a body of work that made a lasting contribution to society. Examples include Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, and Mahatma Gandhi.

Conduct relevant interviews 

Whenever possible, seek firsthand accounts from those who knew or interacted with the subject. Conduct interviews with family members, friends, colleagues, or experts in the field. Their insights and anecdotes can provide a deeper understanding of the person’s character and experiences.

When conducting interviews for a biography, consider the following tips to ensure a productive and insightful conversation:

• Familiarize yourself with the interviewee’s background and accomplishments.
• Develop a list of well-thought-out questions that cover key aspects of their lives and experiences, including questions about your subject’s youth, family, achievements, and life transitions or struggles.
• Begin the interview by establishing a comfortable and friendly atmosphere to put the interviewee at ease.
• Show genuine interest in their story and listen actively to their responses.
• Ask open-ended questions encouraging detailed and reflective responses.
• Avoid yes/no questions and ask for their insights, memories, and personal perspectives.
• Some topics you might consider for your questions include early life, achievements, challenges, motivations, values, relationships, lessons learned, and advice.
• Pay close attention to the interviewee’s answers, body language, and tone of voice.
• Ask follow-up questions to clarify or delve deeper into specific topics.
• Show empathy and understanding, creating a safe space for the interviewee to share personal or sensitive information.
• Remain flexible during the interview, allowing the conversation to flow naturally.
• Be prepared to deviate from your prepared questions if unexpected but relevant topics arise.
• Respect the interviewee’s boundaries and be mindful of any topics they may not wish to discuss.
• Take thorough and organized notes during the interview to capture important details.
• Consider recording the interview (with permission) to ensure accurate quotes and references.
• Ask for permission to follow up with additional questions or for clarification.
• Doing a biography on yourself? Ask yourself deep questions to harvest new stories and anecdotes.

Remember, the goal of the interview is to gather valuable information and personal perspectives that will contribute to the authenticity and depth of your biography. Approach the interview process with sensitivity, respect, and genuine curiosity about the interviewee’s life and experiences.

Develop a clear structure

Outline your biography, ensuring a logical and engaging narrative flow. Consider the chronological order, significant milestones, and turning points in the subject’s life. Organize your gathered information to capture the essence of their journey while maintaining a compelling rhythm throughout. 

A good outline for a biography can vary depending on the specific subject and the desired structure of the narrative. However, here’s a general outline that can serve as a starting point:

A. Introduction

a) Hook or engaging opening to capture the reader’s attention

b) Background information (birthplace, date, family, etc.)

c) A brief overview of the subject’s significance or why they are worth exploring

B. Early Life and Background

a) Childhood and upbringing

b) Influences, such as family, education, or cultural factors

c) Formative experiences or events that shaped the subject’s character or interests

C. Major Achievements and Milestones

a) A chronological exploration of the subject’s notable accomplishments, contributions, or milestones

b) Focus on key moments or achievements that highlight their impact or significance.

c) Provide context and details to paint a vivid picture of their achievements

D. Challenges and Obstacles

a) Discussion of the challenges, setbacks, or adversities the subject encountered

b) How they overcame obstacles or grew through difficult experiences

c) Insights into their resilience, determination, or problem-solving abilities

E. Personal Life and Relationships

a) Exploration of the subject’s relationships, such as family, friends, or romantic partners

b) Insights into their personal joys, struggles, or transformative experiences

c) How their personal life intersected with their professional or public achievements

F. Legacy and Impact

a) Examination of the subject’s lasting influence, contributions, or impact on society

b) Discuss how their work or actions continue to resonate or shape the world today

c) Reflection on their legacy and the lessons we can learn from their life story

G. Conclusion

a) Summarize the key aspects of the subject’s life and their significance

b) Provide a final reflection or insight on their overall journey or impact

c) Leave the reader with a lasting impression or call to action

Pro Tip: Looking for help drafting an outline to get you started? Use free tools like ChatGPT to jumpstart your outline by putting in a prompt request like, “Write an outline for a biography about X, including any relevant details on the subject that should be included.”

Craft captivating prose

Employ descriptive language to transport readers into the subject’s world. Paint vivid portraits of their physical appearance, mannerisms, and surroundings. Use sensory details to evoke emotions and create a strong connection between the reader and the subject. 

Here are some examples:

• “She was a force of nature, with a fierce determination and an unwavering commitment to justice.” (Ruth Bader Ginsburg)
• “His piercing blue eyes seemed to look right through you, and his voice had a commanding presence that demanded attention.” (Winston Churchill)
• “She moved with a grace and elegance that belied her inner strength and resilience.” (Audrey Hepburn)
• “His rugged features and piercing gaze made him a natural leading man, but it was his depth and vulnerability that set him apart.” (Marlon Brando)
• “She had a contagious energy and a magnetic personality that drew people to her like a moth to a flame.” (Princess Diana)
• “His quiet intensity and unwavering dedication to his craft made him one of the greatest artists of his time.” (Leonardo da Vinci)

Action Step: While writing descriptive prose takes some practice, it’s an art you can master with little creative writing skills. To help you write descriptive prose, practice closing your eyes and imagining your subject. 

• What expression is on their face? 
• How are they dressed? 
• What does their body language express? 
• How do they smell? 
• How do they make you feel? 
• How do they make others feel? 
• What’s in their surroundings? 
• What are they doing with their hands? 
• What do you imagine they’re thinking about? 

With questions like these, you’ll start to use descriptive language to bring your subject to life.

Build a balance of objectivity and empathy

Strive for an objective portrayal while infusing empathy and understanding into your writing. Remain aware of biases and preconceived notions, giving your subject the space to shine in their unique light. 

To check yourself, filter your writing and interviewing with these tips:

• Verify Information: Cross-reference information from various sources to ensure accuracy. Use tools like Fact Check Explorer to fact-check claims, dates, and events to avoid errors or inaccuracies that could skew the narrative. 
• Multiple Perspectives: Seek out different viewpoints on the subject. This includes interviewing or reaching out to people with significant interactions or relationships with the subject. Incorporating diverse perspectives can counterbalance biases and provide a broader understanding.
• Empathetic Listening: During interviews or conversations, practice active listening and empathize with the interviewee’s experiences and emotions. This allows you to understand the subject’s perspective and incorporate their insights and feelings into the narrative.
• Contextualize Emotions: When sharing the subject’s emotional experiences or personal struggles, provide sufficient context and background. This helps readers understand the motivations and circumstances behind their actions and allows for empathetic understanding without veering into excessive sentimentality.
• Credible Interpretation: While interpreting the subject’s thoughts, motives, or intentions, be clear about what is factual and what is speculative. Clearly distinguish between evidence-based information and your interpretations to maintain objectivity.
• Respect Boundaries: Be mindful of the subject’s privacy and any requests they may have regarding sensitive or personal information. Respecting their boundaries shows empathy and allows for a respectful portrayal while maintaining the necessary level of objectivity.
• Acknowledge Limitations: Recognize that achieving complete objectivity in a biography is challenging. Biases can inadvertently seep into the narrative. However, by being aware of your biases and consciously presenting a fair and balanced account, you can mitigate their influence.

Respect truth, privacy, and sensitivity

Remember, writing biographies carries ethical responsibilities. It’s important to maintain accuracy through credible research and gain consent while being sensitive to controversial or difficult topics. Here are some considerations:

• Accuracy: Maintain a commitment to truth and accuracy. Verify facts and corroborate information from multiple sources to ensure the reliability of your narrative. Cite your sources and be transparent about any uncertainties or gaps in knowledge.
• Privacy and Consent: Respect the privacy of living individuals mentioned in your biography. Seek consent when sharing personal details or sensitive information. Balance the subject’s right to privacy with the importance of honesty and transparency.
• Sensitivity: Approach sensitive or controversial topics with care and empathy. Consider the potential impact of your words on the subject’s loved ones or affected communities—present differing perspectives without sensationalism or bias.

Writing a Biography FAQs

The length of a biography can vary greatly, depending on the subject and the depth of exploration. Some biographies span a few hundred pages, while others extend to multiple volumes. Focus on capturing the subject’s life’s essence rather than strictly adhering to a predetermined length.

Some common mistakes to avoid when writing a biography include the following: Lack of thorough research or reliance on a single source. Inaccurate or misleading information. Excessive personal bias or projection onto the subject. Neglecting to verify facts or failing to cite sources. Poor organization or a disjointed narrative flow. Neglecting to balance objectivity with empathy. Overloading the biography with irrelevant details or digressions. Failing to respect privacy or ethical considerations.

While chronological order is commonly used in biographies, it is not required. Some biographers employ a thematic approach or explore specific periods or events in the subject’s life. Experiment with different structures to find the most engaging way to tell your subject’s story.

The purpose of writing a biography is to capture and share an individual’s life story. Biographies provide insights into a person’s experiences, achievements, and challenges, offering readers inspiration, knowledge, and understanding. They preserve the legacy of individuals, contribute to historical records, and celebrate the diversity of human lives.

When choosing a subject for your biography, consider someone who inspires you, interests you, or has significantly impacted society. It could be a historical figure, a contemporary icon, or even an everyday individual with a remarkable story. Choose a subject with sufficient available information, access to primary sources or interviews, and a narrative that resonates with you and potential readers.

Key elements to include in a biography are: Early life and background: Provide context about the subject’s upbringing, family, and cultural influences. Achievements and milestones: Highlight notable accomplishments, contributions, and significant events throughout their life. Challenges and struggles: Explore the obstacles they faced, the lessons learned, and how they overcame adversity. Personal characteristics: Describe their personality traits, values, beliefs, and motivations that shaped their actions and decisions. Impact and legacy: Discuss the lasting influence and contributions of the subject, both during their lifetime and beyond.

Including personal anecdotes can add depth and humanize the subject of your biography. However, be selective and ensure that the stories are relevant, contribute to understanding the person’s character or experiences, and align with the overall narrative. Balancing personal anecdotes with factual information is critical to maintaining accuracy and credibility.

Conducting research for a biography involves exploring a variety of sources. Start with primary sources such as personal papers, letters, journals, and interviews with the subject or people who knew them. Secondary sources such as books, articles, and academic papers provide additional context and perspectives. Online databases, archives, libraries, and museums are valuable resources for finding relevant information.

Consult a wide range of sources to ensure a comprehensive and accurate biography. Primary sources, such as personal documents, letters, diaries, and interviews, offer firsthand accounts and unique insights. Secondary sources provide broader context and analysis, including books, articles, scholarly works, and historical records. Remember to evaluate the credibility and reliability of your sources critically.

Organize the information in your biography logically and engagingly. Consider using a chronological structure, starting with the subject’s early life and progressing through significant events and milestones. Alternatively, adopt a thematic approach, grouping related information based on themes or significant aspects of their life. Use clear headings, subheadings, and transitions to guide readers through the narrative flow.

Writing Biographies Key Takeaways

In summary, take note of these ideas and tips before you start writing your biography:

• Biographies hold enduring appeal, offering a glimpse into the human experience across time.
• Thorough research, interviews, and captivating prose are essential for crafting compelling biographies.
• Ethical considerations, such as accuracy, privacy, and sensitivity, are crucial when writing about real people’s lives.
• Choose subjects that genuinely inspire and resonate with you.
• Immerse yourself in the subject’s world to understand their motivations and challenges.
• Develop strong research skills and utilize a wide range of sources.
• Craft a compelling narrative that engages readers from the very first page.
• Seek feedback from trusted sources to refine your writing and storytelling abilities.
• Continuously explore new biographies to broaden your understanding of different styles and approaches.
• Embrace the unique voice and perspective you bring to the storytelling process.

Writing a biography book? Check out this helpful article, How to Write a Book: 10 Questions to Ask Before You Start Writing !

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1 Life Narrative: Definitions and Distinctions

• Published: January 2002
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This chapter explains the ordinary understandings of the concept and practices of self-referential narrative. It distinguishes between autobiographical writing and the practices of related kinds of life writing, namely, biography, the novel, and history writing. The working definition of self-life writing assumes that it is not a single unitary genre or form of autobiography. Rather, the historically situated practices of self-representation may take many guises as narrators selectively engage their lived experience and situate their social identities through personal storytelling. Located in specific times and places, narrators are at the same time in dialogue with the processes and archive of memory and the expectations of disparate others. The chapter describes how self-life writing shares features with the novel, biography, and history as it employs the dialogue, plot, setting, and density of language of novel.

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• Biographical and Documentary Research (SIG #13)

	An Introduction to Biographical Research Among the numerous forms of   biographical research   in education, five types are often noted: schol­arly chronicles, intellectual biography, life history writing, memoir biography, and narrative biogra­phy. These orientations may take the form of articles, vignettes, chapters, monographs, and full-length books. One need not draw fine distinctions among these different approaches, however, and each orientation offers particular strengths for the presentation of the biographical subject. Realms are crossed continually as the intent and purpose of the biographer become more clearly defined during the research process. Ultimately, biographers while engaged in their research are constantly examining their interpretive voices as much as the lives of their biographical subjects. The schol­arly chronicle is the most fundamental (and common) type of biographical research with its focus on the historical portrayal of an individual life. This basic research orientation constitutes telling the sub­ject’s story in chronological order with emphasis upon the development of a quest plot (life pattern-stages) and the description of acts of recognition (or notoriety) as the biographer marches through the life of the biographical subject. The scholarly chronicle is often viewed as synonymous with biography; however, this research orientation is markedly different from other forms of biographical inquiry.    Another genre, intellectual biography, forsakes the need for basic chronological structure and develops a narrative of a life through the conceptual analysis of the subject’s motives and beliefs within the world of ideas. Those who write intellectual biography have overcome the interpretive angst of other educational researchers, what Rollyson (2005) has deemed “the biographical apologia,” who include pages of interviewee narrative and rich description but who refrain from interpreting motives and feelings. In contrast, the intellectual biographer recognizes and accepts the invasive yet justifiable analysis and overcomes the intrusive nature of inquiry with care resulting in self-reflective thoughtfulness and insight.  A third form of biographical research is defined as life history writing (and the narrative study of lives) with strong allegiance to the social science research traditions of oral history and narrative discourse and, specifically, great devotion to theoretical constructs from sociology and psychology. Case study paradigms emerge as life history writers address issues of generalizability, social interaction-social structure, and reliability and validity as well as the biographical quest of any study of a life. This research genre has taken many forms in the field of education, perhaps resonating most in the area of teacher education with the narrative study of teachers’ lives scholarship and, to a lesser degree, with the first-year teacher research that also remains loyal to aspects of intellectual biography (Goodson, 2008; Bullough, 2008). In recent years a fourth genre, memoir biography (still distinct from autobiogra­phy and memoir) has begun to appear in the field of curriculum studies. Attention is devoted to the researcher’s motives in relation to the biographical subject and with emphasis upon the stylistic presentation of the biographer’s reflections and insights in relation to the factual account of the life. An interpretive narrative of the writer, alongside the presentation of the biographical subject, becomes part of the research. A life story is being told, yet in relation to the transactional experiences of the biographer that in turn influences and foreshadows similar experi­ences for the reader. A fifth type, narrative biog­raphy, represents a dynamic portrayal of a life without the need for absolute facticity or a compre­hensive account from birth to grave. Neither is this style burdened by the ultimate interpretation of the subject that must be accepted by the reader. Facts are recognized and some interpretations are accepted as being more significant than others; however, the biogra­pher, though consciously aware of his or her per­sonal emotions and reactions to the subject, acknowledges that the telling of the story is primar­ily defined by the subject in relation to the reader.  No definitive listing of biographical types can ever be constructed since, fortunately, new forms—content and process oriented—are continually being conceived and explored. Other more content-related designations include feminist biography (Alpern, et al., 1992; Ascher, et. al., 1984; Wagner-Martin, 1994) and black biography (Backscheider, 1997), all with emphasis upon identity and the restoration of the “invisible” subject.  Biography’s relationship to autobiography, memoir, and narrative research in education is well developed and will continually be redefined (Denzin, 1989; Epstein, 1991; Rollyson, 2008) Yet, with the emerging interest in biographical inquiry and with some growing interest in prosopography (group biography), little consensus of terminology exists; for example, it should be noted that while some qualitative research­ers view the term as accurate, there are dramatic differences between biography and autobiography—much more than any slash or solidus can convey. Alpern, S., Antler, J., Perry, E. I. & Scobie, I. W. (Eds.) (1992). . Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Ascher, C., DeSalvo, L., & Ruddick, S. (Eds.) (1984). . Boston: Beacon Press. Backscheider, P. R. (1997). . New York: Oxford University Press. Bullough, R. V., Jr. (2008). . Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Denzin, N. (1989). . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Epstein, W. (Ed.) (1991). . West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Garraty, J. (1957). . New York: Knopf. Goodson, I. (2008). . Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Josselson, R. & Lieblich, A. (Eds.) (1993). . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Oates, S. B. (Ed.) (1986). . Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Roberts, B. (2002). . London: Open University Press. Rollyson, C. (2008). . Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Rollyson, C. (2005). Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Wagner-Martin, L. (1994). . New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. By Craig Kridel, University of South Carolina What Is a Biography? Definition & 25+ Examples Have you ever wondered what lies beneath the surface of history’s most influential figures? Imagine a chance to delve into the intricate tapestry of their lives, unraveling the threads that have woven together the very essence of their character, and unearthing the pivotal moments that shaped their destinies. Welcome to the enthralling world of biographies, where you are invited to embark on a captivating journey into the lives of the extraordinary. Prepare to be captivated by the compelling tales of human resilience, ingenuity, and ambition that lie at the heart of each biography. Table of Contents Defining Biography A biography is a detailed account of a person’s life, written by someone other than the subject. The term “biography” is derived from two Greek words: “bio,” which means life, and “graphy,” which signifies writing. Thus, a biography is the written history of someone’s life, offering an in-depth look at their experiences, achievements, and challenges. Biographies typically focus on the life of notable individuals, such as historical figures or celebrities, and provide a comprehensive view of their personal and professional journey. Biographers, the authors of these works, aim to offer an accurate, well-researched portrayal of their subjects by studying various sources and conducting interviews if possible. This thorough research and attention to detail ensure that the resulting narrative is both informative and engaging. Biographies are a subgenre of non-fiction literature, as they chronicle the lives of real people. However, not all life stories fall under the category of biography. Autobiographies and memoirs, for instance, focus on the author’s own experiences and are written from a first-person perspective. While autobiographies aim to present an overarching narrative of the author’s life, memoirs tend to focus on specific incidents or periods. When crafting a biography, it is essential for the biographer to maintain a neutral tone, avoiding any judgment or personal bias. This objectivity allows readers to form their opinions based on the presented facts, gaining a broader understanding of the subject. Elements of a Biography A well-crafted biography contains several key elements that provide a comprehensive picture of the subject’s life. These elements help readers gain a deeper understanding of the subject while fostering an emotional connection. Below are some essential aspects of a biography: Personal and Family Background The personal and family background section of a biography provides an essential foundation for understanding the subject’s journey and the factors that shaped their life. By exploring the subject’s early years, readers gain insight into the environment and experiences that influenced their character, values, and aspirations. This section typically begins with an overview of the subject’s birthplace, family origins, and cultural heritage. It delves into the family dynamics, including descriptions of the subject’s parents, siblings, and extended family, shedding light on the relationships that played a crucial role in their development. The personal and family background section also addresses significant life events, challenges, and milestones that occurred during the subject’s upbringing. These formative experiences may include pivotal moments, such as moving to a new city, attending a particular school, or encountering a mentor who had a lasting impact on their life. Education and Career The education and career section of a biography is crucial for understanding the intellectual and professional development of the subject. By tracing the subject’s academic journey and career progression, readers gain a clearer picture of the knowledge, skills, and experiences that shaped their path and contributed to their success. This section begins by outlining the subject’s educational background, including the schools they attended, the degrees or qualifications they obtained, and any specialized training they received. It also highlights the subject’s academic achievements, such as scholarships, awards, or distinctions, and any influential mentors or teachers who played a significant role in their intellectual growth. The education and career section also delves into the subject’s professional life, chronicling their work history, job titles, and key responsibilities. It explores the subject’s career trajectory, examining how they transitioned between roles or industries and the factors that influenced their choices. Major Events and Turning Points The major events and turning points section of a biography delves into the pivotal moments and experiences that significantly influenced the subject’s life, shaping their character, values, and destiny. By exploring these transformative events, readers gain a deeper understanding of the forces and circumstances that drove the subject’s actions and choices, as well as the challenges and triumphs they faced along the way. This section encompasses a wide range of events, which could include personal milestones, such as marriage, the birth of children, or the loss of a loved one. These personal events often provide insights into the subject’s emotional landscape and reveal the support systems, relationships, and personal values that sustained them through difficult times or propelled them to greater heights. Influences and Inspirations The influences and inspirations section of a biography delves into the individuals, ideas, and events that had a profound impact on the subject’s beliefs, values, and aspirations. By understanding the forces that shaped the subject’s worldview, readers gain a deeper appreciation for the motivations driving their actions and decisions, as well as the creative and intellectual foundations upon which their accomplishments were built. This section often begins by identifying the key figures who played a significant role in the subject’s life, such as family members, mentors, peers, or historical figures they admired. It explores the nature of these relationships and how they shaped the subject’s perspectives, values, and ambitions. These influential individuals can provide valuable insights into the subject’s personal growth and development, revealing the sources of inspiration and guidance that fueled their journey. The influences and inspirations section also delves into the ideas and philosophies that resonated with the subject and shaped their worldview. This could include an exploration of the subject’s religious, political, or philosophical beliefs, as well as the books, theories, or artistic movements that inspired them. This section examines the events, both personal and historical, that impacted the subject’s life and inspired their actions. These could include moments of personal transformation, such as a life-altering experience or an epiphany, or broader societal events, such as wars, social movements, or technological innovations. Contributions and Impact The contributions and impact section of a biography is pivotal in conveying the subject’s lasting significance, both in their chosen profession and beyond. By detailing their achievements, innovations, and legacies, this section helps readers grasp the extent of the subject’s influence and the ways in which their work has shaped the world around them. This section begins by highlighting the subject’s key accomplishments within their profession, such as breakthroughs, discoveries, or innovative techniques they developed. It delves into the processes and challenges they faced along the way, providing valuable insights into their creativity, determination, and problem-solving abilities. The contributions and impact section also explores the subject’s broader influence on society, culture, or the world at large. This could include their involvement in social or political movements, their philanthropic endeavors, or their role as a cultural icon. In addition to discussing the subject’s immediate impact, this section also considers their lasting legacy, exploring how their work has continued to inspire and shape subsequent generations. This could involve examining the subject’s influence on their successors, the institutions or organizations they helped establish, or the enduring relevance of their ideas and achievements in contemporary society. Personal Traits and Characteristics The personal traits and characteristics section of a biography brings the subject to life, offering readers an intimate glimpse into their personality, qualities, and views. This section often begins by outlining the subject’s defining personality traits, such as their temperament, values, and passions. By exploring these attributes, readers gain insight into the subject’s character and the motivations driving their actions and decisions. These qualities could include their perseverance, curiosity, empathy, or sense of humor, which may help explain their achievements, relationships, and outlook on life. The personal traits and characteristics section also delves into the subject’s views and beliefs, offering a window into their thoughts and opinions on various topics. This could include their perspectives on politics, religion, culture, or social issues, providing readers with a clearer understanding of the context in which they operated and the factors that shaped their worldview. Anecdotes and personal stories play a crucial role in illustrating the subject’s personality and characteristics, as they offer concrete examples of their behavior, actions, or interactions with others. Quotes and first-hand accounts from the subject or those who knew them well can also be invaluable in portraying their personal traits and characteristics. These accounts offer unique insights into the subject’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences, allowing readers to see the world through their eyes and better understand their character. Types of Biographies Biographies come in various forms and styles, each presenting unique perspectives on the lives of individuals. Some of the most common types of biographies are discussed in the following sub-sections. Historical Fiction Biography Historical fiction biographies artfully weave together factual information with imaginative elements, creating a vibrant tapestry of the past. By staying true to the core of a historical figure’s life and accomplishments, these works offer a unique window into their world while granting authors the creative freedom to delve deeper into their emotions, relationships, and personal struggles. Such biographies strike a delicate balance, ensuring that the essence of the individual remains intact while allowing for fictional embellishments to bring their story to life. This captivating blend of fact and fiction serves to humanize these iconic figures, making their experiences more relatable and engaging for readers who embark on a journey through the pages of history. Here are several examples of notable historical fiction biographies: “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel (2009) “The Paris Wife” by Paula McLain (2011) “Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Tracy Chevalier (1999) “The Other Boleyn Girl” by Philippa Gregory (2001) “Loving Frank” by Nancy Horan (2007) Academic Biography Academic biographies stand as meticulously researched and carefully crafted scholarly works, dedicated to presenting an accurate and comprehensive account of a subject’s life. Authored by experts or researchers well-versed in their field, these biographies adhere to rigorous standards of accuracy, sourcing, and objectivity. They delve into the intricacies of a person’s life, achievements, and impact, scrutinizing every aspect with scholarly precision. Intended for an educated audience, academic biographies serve as valuable resources for those seeking a deeper understanding of the subject’s contributions and influence. By placing the individual within the broader context of their time, these works illuminate the complex web of factors that shaped their lives and legacies. While academic biographies may not always carry the same narrative flair as their fictional counterparts, their commitment to factual integrity and thorough analysis make them indispensable resources for scholars, students, and enthusiasts alike Here are several examples of notable academic biographies: “Einstein: His Life and Universe” by Walter Isaacson (2007) “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson (2011) “John Adams” by David McCullough (2001) “Alexander the Great” by Robin Lane Fox (1973) “Marie Curie: A Life” by Susan Quinn (1995) Authorized Biographies Authorized biographies offer a unique perspective on the lives of their subjects, as they are written with the explicit consent and, often, active participation of the individual in question. This collaboration between the biographer and the subject can lead to a more accurate, detailed, and intimate portrayal of the person’s life, as the author is granted access to a wealth of personal information, documents, and anecdotes that might otherwise be inaccessible. When working on an authorized biography, the biographer is typically given permission to access personal documents, such as letters, diaries, and photographs, which can provide invaluable insights into the subject’s thoughts, emotions, and experiences. This primary source material allows the biographer to construct a narrative that is grounded in fact and captures the essence of the individual’s life and personality. Here are several examples of notable authorized biographies: “Mandela: The Authorized Biography” by Anthony Sampson (1999) “Marilyn Monroe: The Biography” by Donald Spoto (1993) “Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words” by Malka Marom (2014) “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life” by Alice Schroeder (2008) “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg” by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik (2015) Fictionalized Academic Biography Fictionalized academic biographies merge the best of both worlds, combining the rigorous research and scholarly integrity of academic biographies with the engaging storytelling of historical fiction. Authors of these works expertly navigate the delicate balance between maintaining factual accuracy and venturing into the realm of imagination. This approach allows them to explore the subject’s personal life, relationships, and the broader historical context in a compelling manner, while ensuring the narrative remains firmly rooted in well-researched facts. Here are several examples of notable fictionalized academic biographies: “The Women” by T.C. Boyle (2009) “Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald” by Therese Anne Fowler (2013) “The Marriage of Opposites” by Alice Hoffman (2015) “Vanessa and Her Sister” by Priya Parmar (2014) “The Last Days of Night” by Graham Moore (2016) Prophetic Biography Prophetic biographies delve into the rich and profound narratives of religious figures or prophets, meticulously weaving together insights from sacred texts, religious traditions, and historical accounts. By providing a comprehensive portrayal of the individual’s life, teachings, and impact on society, these biographies serve as an invaluable resource for understanding the pivotal role these figures played in shaping the course of religious history and the lives of the faithful. Here are several examples of notable prophetic biographies: “Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources” by Martin Lings (1983) “The Life of Moses” by F.B. Meyer (1893) “The Life of the Buddha: According to the Pali Canon” by Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli (1972) “The Quest of the Historical Jesus” by Albert Schweitzer (1906) “The Lives of the Saints” by Alban Butler (1756) Biography Development Process A biography is a comprehensive written account of an individual’s life, and the development process involves several essential components to ensure the biography’s accuracy and readability. A biographer’s primary responsibility is to conduct extensive research in order to gather a comprehensive array of facts about the subject. This meticulous process involves reviewing various documents and sources that shed light on the individual’s life and experiences, as well as the historical context in which they lived. Key documents, such as birth and death certificates, provide essential information about the subject’s origins and family background. Personal correspondence, letters, and diaries offer invaluable insights into the subject’s thoughts, emotions, relationships, and experiences. News articles, on the other hand, can reveal public perceptions of the subject, as well as their impact on society and culture. Archives often serve as treasure troves of information for biographers, as they contain a wealth of primary sources that can help illuminate the subject’s life and times. These archives may include collections of personal papers, photographs, audio recordings, and other materials that offer first-hand accounts of the individual’s experiences or shed light on their accomplishments and impact. Consulting relevant books and articles is another crucial aspect of a biographer’s research process, as these secondary sources provide context, analysis, and interpretation of the subject’s life and work. By delving into the existing scholarship and engaging with the works of other researchers, biographers can solidify their understanding of the individual and the historical circumstances in which they lived. Interviewing people who knew the subject personally is a vital component of a biographer’s research process, as it allows them to access unique insights, personal stories, and firsthand accounts of the individual’s life. Friends, family members, co-workers, and colleagues can all offer valuable perspectives on the subject’s character, relationships, achievements, and challenges, thereby enriching the biographer’s understanding of their life and experiences. While subjective anecdotes offer a more intimate glimpse into the subject’s personality and personal life, it is essential for biographers to balance these accounts with factual research. By corroborating and contextualizing personal stories with objective information gleaned from primary and secondary sources, biographers can ensure that their portrayal of the individual’s life remains accurate and well-rounded. This process of balancing subjective anecdotes with factual research also allows biographers to present a more nuanced and comprehensive view of their subject. By weaving together personal stories with historical context, biographers can create a richer and more engaging narrative that captures the complexity and multifaceted nature of the individual’s life. In addition, by considering various perspectives and sources of information, biographers can address potential biases or discrepancies in their account, resulting in a more reliable and credible portrayal of the subject. This careful attention to detail and commitment to accuracy not only enhances the quality of the biography but also helps establish trust between the biographer and their readers. Chronological Narration Organizing a biography in a chronological manner is a highly effective approach, as it allows readers to follow the subject’s life events in a logical and coherent sequence. By presenting the information in a linear fashion, the biographer enables readers to trace the subject’s journey from their early years to their later accomplishments, making it easier to understand the context and progression of their life. To effectively arrange a chronological narrative, the biographer should begin by highlighting significant milestones and accomplishments in the subject’s life. These key events serve as anchor points in the story, helping to structure the narrative and maintain the reader’s interest. By focusing on these pivotal moments, the biographer can illustrate the subject’s growth, development, and achievements over time, providing a clear and engaging overview of their life’s trajectory. Contextualization Contextualizing the subject within their historical and cultural framework is a crucial aspect of biographical writing, as it enables readers to gain a deeper understanding of the individual’s life, choices, and significance. Embedding the subject within their historical context involves examining the political, social, and economic landscape of the time. This includes exploring major events, trends, and issues that affected the subject’s life and decisions, such as wars, social movements, technological advancements, or cultural shifts. Additionally, considering the subject’s cultural context is essential for understanding their beliefs, values, and creative expression. This involves examining the artistic, intellectual, and philosophical currents of the time, which may have influenced the subject’s work, ideas, or relationships. Moreover, contextualizing the subject within their historical and cultural framework can help to humanize them, revealing the complexities, contradictions, and struggles that are often inherent in the human experience. This approach offers readers a more nuanced and empathetic understanding of the subject, allowing them to see the person as a product of their time and circumstances, rather than as an isolated figure. Famous Biographies and Biographers The life of samuel johnson, ll.d. by james boswell (1791). “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.” is a biography of the English writer and literary critic Samuel Johnson, written by his friend and contemporary James Boswell. Published in 1791, it is often considered one of the greatest biographies in the English language and a pioneering work in the development of modern biography as a literary genre. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was a prominent figure in 18th-century English literature, known for his wide-ranging knowledge, wit, and moral authority. He is best remembered for his dictionary, “A Dictionary of the English Language,” published in 1755, which became the standard English dictionary for over a century. He was also a prolific essayist, poet, and critic. James Boswell (1740-1795) was a Scottish lawyer, diarist, and author who became friends with Johnson in 1763. Over the course of their friendship, Boswell made detailed notes of their conversations and observations, which he later used as the basis for his biography. “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.” is a comprehensive and vivid portrait of Johnson’s life, character, and work. Boswell covers Johnson’s early years, education, and struggles with poverty and illness, as well as his rise to prominence as a writer and his involvement in the vibrant literary circles of 18th-century London. The biography also delves into Johnson’s friendships and relationships, including his long association with Hester Thrale, a prominent society hostess, and writer. What sets Boswell’s biography apart is his skill in capturing Johnson’s personality, wit, and conversation. By presenting Johnson’s thoughts and opinions on a wide range of topics, as well as anecdotes and reminiscences from those who knew him, Boswell creates a vivid and engaging portrait of his subject. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” is a non-fiction book written by Rebecca Skloot, published in 2010. The book tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman whose cancer cells were taken without her knowledge or consent during a biopsy in 1951. These cells, known as HeLa cells, became the first immortal human cell line, reproducing indefinitely under laboratory conditions. HeLa cells have been used extensively in medical research, contributing to significant scientific breakthroughs, such as the development of the polio vaccine, gene mapping, and cancer research. Henrietta Lacks was a young mother of five when she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cervical cancer at the age of 31. She received treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where a sample of her cancerous tissue was taken without her knowledge. Henrietta passed away in 1951, but her cells continued to live on, revolutionizing medical research. Rebecca Skloot spent more than a decade researching Henrietta Lacks’ life and the scientific history of HeLa cells. Skloot also interviewed Lacks’ surviving family members, who were unaware of Henrietta’s contribution to science until the 1970s. The book explores the ethical issues surrounding the use of human tissue in research, the question of consent, and the lack of compensation for the Lacks family. Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (2004) “Alexander Hamilton” is a comprehensive biography of the American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, written by historian and biographer Ron Chernow. Published in 2004, the book provides an in-depth look into Hamilton’s life, from his humble beginnings in the West Indies to his significant contributions as a statesman, economist, and influential figure in early American history. Chernow’s biography delves into Hamilton’s early life as an orphan in the Caribbean, his immigration to the American colonies, and his education. It also explores his involvement in the American Revolutionary War, where he served as an aide to General George Washington and later as an artillery officer. The book details Hamilton’s role in the development of the United States Constitution and his work as the first Secretary of the Treasury under President Washington, where he was instrumental in establishing the nation’s financial system. “Alexander Hamilton” also examines Hamilton’s personal life, including his relationships, marriage, and infamous extramarital affair, as well as his longstanding political rivalries with figures such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Aaron Burr. The biography concludes with the story of Hamilton’s tragic death in a duel with Burr in 1804. It received critical acclaim and won several awards, including the George Washington Book Prize. The biography also inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to create the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton,” which premiered in 2015 and went on to achieve widespread popularity and numerous accolades, further solidifying Alexander Hamilton’s place in popular culture and history. Notable Biographies in Different Fields Science and technology. Biographies in the field of science and technology offer fascinating insights into the lives and minds of extraordinary individuals who have made significant advancements in their respective fields. These biographies often provide an in-depth look at the personal and professional lives of scientists, inventors, engineers, and other innovators, highlighting their discoveries, inventions, and contributions to human knowledge and progress. Arts and Literature Biographies of artists, actors, and writers often provide captivating and inspiring accounts of the lives of these creative individuals. By examining their personal and professional journeys, these biographies allow readers to gain a deeper understanding of the inspirations, motivations, and challenges that have shaped their subjects’ artistic achievements. These biographies often delve into the early lives of their subjects, exploring formative experiences that may have influenced their creative paths. They also examine the artistic processes and the development of the subjects’ distinctive styles, providing valuable insights into their creative methodologies, influences, and inspirations. Sports and Athletics Biographies of athletes provide riveting accounts of the lives and careers of remarkable individuals who have achieved greatness in the world of sports. These stories often serve as powerful sources of inspiration, showcasing the dedication, perseverance, and triumphs of athletes who have overcome obstacles and pushed the boundaries of human potential. These biographies delve into the formative experiences of their subjects, exploring how early influences, innate talent, and personal motivations led them to pursue athletic excellence. They also provide insights into the rigorous training regimens, discipline, and sacrifices that athletes make to achieve their goals, highlighting the incredible determination and work ethic that underpin their success. Additionally, biographies of athletes often touch on the personal challenges and setbacks these individuals have faced, such as injuries, controversies, or personal struggles. Historical Figures Biographies of historical figures offer a unique window into the lives, personalities, and experiences of individuals who have left lasting impacts on the world. By delving into the stories of these influential people, readers can gain a deeper understanding of the political, social, and cultural contexts that shaped their actions and decisions, as well as the lasting legacies they left behind. These biographies often provide richly detailed accounts of their subjects’ lives, including their upbringing, education, relationships, and personal struggles. By exploring the complex facets of these individuals, biographies help to humanize historical figures, providing a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of their motivations, beliefs, and actions. In addition to personal narratives, biographies of historical figures often weave together broader historical contexts and events. This allows readers to gain valuable insights into the social, political, and cultural forces that influenced their subjects’ lives and decisions. Writing a Compelling Biography A captivating biography requires more than just a simple retelling of a person’s life events. It delves into their personal experiences, relationships, and accomplishments, while maintaining an objective and authentic approach. Being Objective and Authentic An essential aspect of a well-written biography is its objectivity. The narrative should portray the real person, depicting their experiences and beliefs accurately. While it can be tempting to embellish facts or minimize flaws, striving for authenticity is crucial in presenting a credible account. This involves thorough research and verification of facts, even when they contradict the author’s initial assumptions. Authenticity also extends to the respectful portrayal of a subject’s relationships and exploration of their inner world, while avoiding speculation or gossip. Balancing Personal and Public Life When writing a biography, one must strike a balance between the subject’s personal and public life. This includes weaving together stories from their childhood, personal relationships, and major life events that may have shaped their character. The integration of both personal and public aspects contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of their vita. However, careful consideration must be given to privacy concerns, and it is important to determine which aspects of the individual’s life are appropriate to disclose. Ultimately, the reader should gain insight into the person’s journey without feeling intrusive. Creating Engaging Storylines Just as in a novel, a great biography should feature engaging storylines that keep readers interested. This can be achieved by organizing the narrative around important events, challenges, and accomplishments that are relevant and compelling. To maintain a smooth flow, strategically transitioning between these key moments helps maintain reader interest. The use of different perspectives, anecdotes, and historical context can also enhance the storyline. Paint vivid pictures of the settings, allowing readers to immerse themselves in the subject’s world. Furthermore, showcasing the subject’s resilience, growth, and impact, can contribute to a powerful and memorable biography. Frequently Asked Questions Can biographies be fictional or purely factual. Biographies usually aim to present an accurate and factual representation of someone’s life. However, some authors might take creative liberties and incorporate fictionalized elements for dramatic or storytelling purposes. It is crucial for readers to be aware of the author’s intentions and approach when reading such biographical works. Can biographies be biased? Biographies, like any form of writing, can be subject to biases depending on the author’s perspective, beliefs, or intentions. It is essential for readers to critically evaluate biographies by considering factors such as the author’s credentials, potential biases, and the sources used in the research process. By comparing multiple biographies on the same subject or cross-referencing with other sources, readers can develop a more comprehensive and balanced understanding of the individual’s life and achievements. Are biographies always based on famous or historical figures? While biographies often focus on famous or historical figures, they can also be written about lesser-known individuals with compelling stories or unique experiences. These “everyday” biographies can provide valuable insights into the lives of ordinary people and the challenges they face, offering a broader understanding of the human experience and fostering empathy and connection among readers. Are there any ethical considerations when writing a biography? Yes, ethical considerations play a significant role in writing biographies. Biographers must respect the privacy and dignity of their subjects, particularly when dealing with sensitive or personal information. They should also strive for accuracy and fairness, avoiding sensationalism or misrepresentation of facts. Additionally, biographers should acknowledge and address any potential biases or conflicts of interest that may affect their portrayal of the subject. Biographies offer us unparalleled access to the lives and legacies of remarkable individuals, spanning diverse genres and approaches. From historical fiction to academic rigor, prophetic accounts to fictionalized narratives, biographies captivate our imagination and enrich our understanding of the human experience. These literary gems remind us that behind every great achievement lies a story of struggle, triumph, and unwavering determination. So, let us continue to explore these remarkable journeys, as we delve deeper into the pages of history and the hearts of those who have shaped our world. How useful was this post? Click on a star to rate it! As you found this post useful... Share it on social media! We are sorry that this post was not useful for you! Let us improve this post! Tell us how we can improve this post? Biography Narrative Essay Biography narrative essay generator. If you were given a chance to write a person’s biography, would you take that opportunity? A lot of people may see this as a good type of job to get into, while others may see this as a hobby. However you want to see it, it really is a good opportunity. Better yet, what if you are given the chance to write your own autobiography? A lot of people would take that as a chance to show their readers or the rest of the world who they are and what they can do. Of course, it is not always for everyone either. When we think of narratives we often think of the length of either an essay , a story or a speech. But we do not often think that even a biography could be part of that idea. Often than not, we mistake biography and autobiography so much that we think they mean the same thing but with different spelling. Firstly, they are different and they do mean different things. But what does a biography narrative essay mean and what can it do for you? To find out what it can do for you, check out 10+ examples of a biography narrative essay.  10+ Biography Narrative Essay Examples 1. biography narrative essay. Size: 36 KB 2. Autobiographical Narrative Essay Size: 65 KB 3. Political Biography Narrative Essay 4. Biography Narrative Essay Template Size: 164 KB 5. Basic Biography Narrative Essay Size: 207 KB 6. Biography Narrative Agency Essay Size: 268 KB 7. Fiction Biography Narrative Essay Size: 124 KB 8. Formal Biography Narrative Essay 9. Budding Renaissance of Biography Narrative Essay Size: 56 KB 10. Cultural Autobiography Narrative Essay Size: 71 KB 11. Biography Narrative Essay Sheet Size: 191 KB What Is a Biography Narrative Essay? We know that a biography and an autobiography are two different things, what we do not often hear is that a biography can also be used in a narrative essay . So what is a biography narrative essay ? This is a kind of narrative essay that you write when you are talking or writing about a person’s life story. This kind of essay focuses on you as the writer telling a story about a famous person like an author of a story, a poet or even an athlete. Of course you can also be writing an autobiography narrative essay, and it works just the same. The only difference is that you are writing your own story to let the world know who you are as a person. In addition to that, you can also be writing about cultural biographies and they would work the same as you may write with a narrative essay. As long as you know what you are writing about and the difference between a biography and an autobiography. The importance of a biography narrative essay is to tell a story. To be able to tell the life story of a person you may or may not have met. As well as to be able to share it in the form of an essay. How to Write a Biography Narrative Essay? Having the opportunity to write a biography narrative essay is fun and exciting, but there are also things you should know about it. One of which is how and the other is why. Since we already know the reason, it is time we learned the ways to write it . 1. Do Your Personal Research First Take some time to do your personal research first. Before you make your biography narrative essay, find time on who you are planning on talking about. Whether this person is alive or deceased also matters. To be able to make a good narrative essay from their lives, you must at least know or understand even a bit of information about them. 2. Permission Is Always Best and Professional Getting permission from the person you are planning on writing a biography essay is also best and professional. It not only puts you in a good light, but it also shows that you take their word at heart. Asking for permission shows that you understand their need for privacy as well as the fact that you show them respect. It never hurts anyone to ask permission to whom they plan on writing a biography about. 3.  Draft a Short Timeline Before You Write To make your biography narrative essay a success, draft a short timeline before you write. This timeline could be about the events of the life of the person you are going to be writing or your own if you plan to write an autobiography. Also, drafting your work before finalizing it would make it easier for you to see which should be placed and which should be disregarded. 4. Rewrite Your Essay and Finalize Everything When you have finished writing the draft and you are sure that it is enough and okay, you can start by rewriting your essay and finalizing everything. Of course this would take time, but it is really worth rewriting if you need to check everything first. As well as finalizing everything means you have to check if the information is correct, your grammar and spelling are fine too. 5. Read Your Biography Narrative Essay Before Passing To be sure that you got it right, the best way to do so is to read your biography narrative essay. To make sure that the tone is right, the way you are presenting it as well. Ask someone for help to be sure that how you deliver is presentable and professional. As well as using the words in your essay that would be easy to say and explain. What is a biography narrative essay? A biography narrative essay is a kind of essay that is based on you writing someone’s story. An essay that focuses on a person’s life story being written down by someone else and to present it to class. Why should you ask permission to write someone’s story? Asking for permission is not only polite, but it also gives you a chance to see if the person wants their story known. It is also a good way for you to avoid plagiarism by having the permission from the person, rather than just to write about them and pass it off as if it were nothing. What is one thing that should be avoided? Writing a biography narrative, avoid any fabrications and plagiarism. To avoid this kind of mistake, do not fabricate their work and pass it as yours. Avoid fabricating anything they may say and change it to something more interesting. Having the opportunity to write biographies for famous people is what others can say is a dream come true. A lot of people would even take the opportunity to write their own autobiographies and share it to the world. Whether you plan on writing a biography or an autobiography, there should always be things you should take into consideration. Always remember that when writing these kinds of essays, fabricating it will never get you anywhere. Text prompt Instructive Professional Write a Biography Narrative Essay on the life and achievements of Marie Curie. Create a Biography Narrative Essay about the contributions of Martin Luther King Jr. to civil rights. How to Write a Biographical Narrative Essay Jon zamboni. A narrative essay provides a narrative, or story, to its reader, while a biographical essay describes the life of another person. When you write a biographical narrative essay, you are telling the story of another person's life. Before you begin writing, decide what aspects of a person's life you want to explore, and what examples you will use to explore them. Explore this article Decide on Your Subject Find Events to Illustrate Your Story Structure Your Narrative Concrete Details 1 Decide on Your Subject The first and most important decision you must make when writing your essay is who you will focus on. Your subject could be a member of your family, a friend, or even a historical figure. Keep in mind, however, that the less you know about this person, the less you will know about their feelings and motivations. If you're writing about someone you know well, ask them questions. Pick an aspect of that person's life to focus on. To make your essay as interesting as possible, chose a time in that person's life that shows change or growth. For example, if you were writing about your older sister, you could focus on a time when she was fighting with your parents, and how they eventually started to get along again. 2 Find Events to Illustrate Your Story Once you've picked the person on whom you want to focus and the story you want to explore, choose events that you will use to tell your story . Find three or four times in your subject's life that illustrate the struggle or growth that you're writing about. These could be as simple as small conversations you've had with that person, or as dramatic as a mental breakdown. When you pick an event, think about how you will use it to show change in your subject. This is especially important if you are writing about a historical figure, since you will only have events, and not your personal impressions, to analyze. On the other hand, say you are writing about your sister's contentious relationship with your parents. Perhaps you noticed that for a long time she simply avoided talking to them, but when she turned 16 they started having loud, drawn-out fights. Even if you don't think this is a positive change, you could use it to show how your sister had changed, and was now able to confront your parents. 3 Structure Your Narrative Now that you know the major events you want to concentrate on, use them to figure out your essay's structure. Your essay should begin with a paragraph or two providing background for your story. Describe the person you are writing about, and the setting of your story. Where did they live? What sort of things did they enjoy? What kind of relationship do you have with them, if any? The bulk of your paper will be the three or four events that you have chosen. Place these in chronological order -- that is, in the order in which they happened. This will give your reader a sense of progression over time. Finally, include a couple paragraphs at the end of your essay to provide conclusion to your story. Tie up any unaddressed details in these paragraphs, and provide a description of your subject, showing how he has changed. 4 Concrete Details With your structure, you can put pen to paper and write your essay. A narrative essay should include descriptive, concrete details . For example, if you are writing a scene in a park, you could describe whether it was sunny or rainy, what color the trees were, whether birds were chirping. These details will make your story feel more grounded, and allow your reader to feel closer to the physical events you're describing. Use longer descriptions in place of vague statements. For example, instead of writing "It was dark outside," you might use "She couldn't see 2 feet in front of her." Once you've written a draft of your essay, go back and edit it. Check for spelling, grammar and run-on sentences. Replace vague descriptions with details. Remove repetitive sentences, and expand any sections that feel too short. Finally, check whether your concluding paragraphs address the central point of your story, and tie up any loose ends. 1 East Side High School District: Biographical Essay -- Writing Resources About the Author Jon Zamboni began writing professionally in 2010. He has previously written for The Spiritual Herald, an urban health care and religious issues newspaper based in New York City, and online music magazine eBurban. Zamboni has a Bachelor of Arts in religious studies from Wesleyan University. Related Articles How to Write a Historical Narrative How to Write a College Narrative Essay How to Write an Essay About Someone How to Write an Autobiographical Synopsis How to Write a Character Analysis for Middle School How to Use Tenses in Writing How to Write a Narrative Argument How to Write an Introductory Paragraph for a Narrative How to Write a Memory Paper Recipe for a Narrative Form How to Write Funeral Tributes How to Enhance a Narrative Essay Directions for Writing a Descriptive Essay in Middle... How to Get Brush-On Eyebrows to Last How to Write a Self-Descriptive Essay Guidelines for Students to Write a Memoir How to Write an Essay Describing a Life Experience How to Get Rid of Jealous People How to Make a Timeline for a School Project How to Write a Self-Reflective Essay Regardless of how old we are, we never stop learning. Classroom is the educational resource for people of all ages. 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When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn commission.   The narrative about motherhood on ‘Vanderpump Rules’ is entirely wrong After lala kent faced considerable backlash for her comments made toward her child-free cast mates during the vanderpump rules season 11 reunion, meredith clark asks whether we should expect anything more from a cast that notoriously skirts responsibility. Article bookmarked Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile Sign up to our free Living Well email for advice on living a happier, healthier and longer life Live your life healthier and happier with our free weekly living well newsletter, thanks for signing up to the living well email. “Scandoval,” the quippy nickname given to one of the most shocking infidelity scandals on reality television, catapulted Bravo ’s Vanderpump Rules into newfound fame last year. The show, which aired on the network in 2013, initially followed a group of broke, incestuous bartenders and servers working at the sexy and unique West Hollywood restaurant, SUR. The high-stakes drama and record viewership of season 10 even scored Bravo its first Emmy nomination for Outstanding Unstructured Reality Program. And while dedicated fans of Vanderpump Rules – those who had long professed to critics, “No, the point is that they’re all bad people!” – finally felt some validation, it soon turned sour when they realized that there wasn’t much else to hold onto upon watching its latest season. Season 11, which wrapped up its three-part reunion on May 28, overwhelmingly put a bad taste in viewers’ mouths, so much so that Bravo put production on “pause” for the foreseeable future. Throughout the season, fans were initially annoyed by the cast’s easy-to-forgive sentiments toward Tom Sandoval, who had cheated on his long-time partner Ariana Madix with fellow cast member Rachel Leviss. But what had really angered viewers (namely, those who have children) during the final reunion episode were comments made by the show’s voice of reason, Lala Kent. “There is something that Lala did tonight that I will never, ever be able to understand, especially as a mom,” began TikTok user Erika Bazaldua Holland , in a viral video with more than 775,000 views. “You do not get to use your children as a weapon to make other people feel bad about their decisions.” In the episode, the 33-year-old expressed her frustrations with her fellow cast members for their lack of authenticity while filming, and how nobody “stepped up to the f***ing plate” during the season – intentionally breaking the sacred fourth wall. “If you don’t give a f*** about your position on the show because you’re thriving, I’m gonna need you to give a f*** about mine,” Lala told her co-stars, as she explained how her Bravo paycheck (and her profitable “Send It to Darrell” sweatshirts ) are used to help support her three-year-old daughter as a single mom. There’s no denying that Lala – real name Lauren Elyse Burningham – has faced her fair share of injustices during her tenure on Vanderpump Rules , which began when she joined the show in season four at 22 years old. Her former fiancée, disgraced Hollywood producer Randall Emmett , was exposed to be dating a 23-year-old the same month their daughter Ocean was born in March 2021. While she’s happily welcoming another daughter in September via sperm donor, Lala’s bitter custody battle continues to rage on, as she’s been given the major stipulation from her ex not to feature their daughter on the show. However, according to Vanderpump Rules fans, that doesn’t give her the right to hold her cast members accountable for decisions she made as a mother. “Everything Lala has done, any mistakes, any bad behavior, and her need to make money off the show is okay because she is a mom,” wrote one viewer on the widely-popular (and snarky) Vanderpump Rules subreddit page. “I understand being a mom is hard, but being a person is hard too and the hypocrisy is not okay simply because she has a daughter and Ariana doesn’t.” “Lala’s need to provide for her kids is not everyone else’s responsibility. I don’t understand why she is putting that on everyone else,” another TikTok commenter agreed. The Bravo network – helmed by its larger-than-life figurehead and executive producer , Andy Cohen – has earned its place at the top of pop culture lexicon for amplifying the real-life stories of women and mothers. Ever since the first episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County aired in 2006, cameras have captured tear-jerker moments like Vicki Gunvalson collapsing on the floor when her own mother died, Jacqueline Laurita advocating for autism awareness through her son’s diagnosis, and the emotional reunion between Teresa Guidice and her four daughters after she returned home from a 12-month stint in prison. These dynamic storylines from real-life mothers have always struck a chord with Bravo’s majority female viewership. So what is it about Lala’s non-traditional relationship to motherhood that has made fans turn against her? Josh Lora , who is a market research professional by day, has become a notable TikTok presence for his breakdowns on the intersections of Bravo and sociology. For him, it’s not that Vanderpump Rules viewers don’t want to see authentic stories about motherhood existing on a show that’s mainly known for drunken hookups and cheating scandals. Really, it’s that by guilt tripping your fellow cast members (who are, essentially, your co-workers) for not sticking by the reality TV playbook, it absolves you of all accountability. “Lala saying: ‘Well, I’m only here to feed my kid,’ it turns so many people off,” Lora told The Independent. “It’s this interesting tension between needing the fourth wall to captivate us and draw us in, versus seeing the actual bare bones mechanics of filming the show and contract renewals and all of this stuff that we ostensibly care about. But it actually really soured us on everyone and everything involved.” For the majority of Vanderpump Rules viewers – adults between the ages of 18 and 49 – the idea of admonishing your child free co-workers for not meeting a certain deadline at work or failing to contribute to a presentation, and then accusing them of jeopardizing your livelihood as a parent, seems entirely unthinkable. “We are all adults, we all have jobs. I don’t think it’s anyone’s responsibility to provide for someone else’s kid. Lala is trying to get them to care more about her child than they should,” said Lora. “At the end of the day, yes they’re friends, but they’re also co-workers. So using the argument: ‘You have to do this because I have to feed my child,’ isn’t necessarily the most salient [rationalization].” When Holland posted her viral TikTok video, sharing her thoughts about the Vanderpump Rules part three reunion, it wasn’t to stir the proverbial pot or to stoke some online controversy. It was because, for perhaps the first time ever as an avid Vanderpump Rules watcher, the show made her contemplate her own position as a new mother herself. “As moms, we watch Bravo and we take on a new perspective. I certainly have a new perspective watching Bravo as a mom at 32 than I did when I was single and 30. We cannot expect other people to come at this with the same force that we do as moms,” Holland told The Independent . “Being a mom is the best part of my life, and Lala would say the same thing. But to then put that responsibility on somebody else is just not appropriate.” Of course, it’s easy to assume that the Give Them Lala Beauty founder’s passionate remarks to her co-stars were made out of frustration with her own unfortunate situation. Much like Ariana, Lala – who was 19 years younger than her ex-fiancé – was also the victim of an infidelity scandal. However, unlike Ariana, she didn’t receive a sponsorship deal with Duracell, appear on Dancing with the Stars , and make her Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in Chicago over it. Even Lala herself said it in the season 11 finale of Vanderpump Rules: “I have never experienced someone who gets cheated on and suddenly she becomes God.” For Holland, who has chosen to give the single mother the benefit of the doubt, she perceived Lala’s widely criticized comments about motherhood as rather the “peak of her projection” in that moment. “The conversation about motherhood is a very personal one. You see the chords that are hit with Lala and Scheana [Shay]. Their kids are their Achilles heel, and it should be,” she said. “But I think what we saw from them is that a lot of their motivation is driven from a place of love, but also a place of fear.” Following the negative response to the Vanderpump Rules reunion, Lala took to her podcast, titled Give Them Lala , to clear up some of the misconceptions surrounding her behavior towards her castmates (and her fans) this season. During the podcast episode, which aired on May 29, Lala admitted that filming season 11 was “bittersweet” and watching the episodes back was “one of the most difficult things” she’s had to do. While she initially dedicated episodes of her podcast toward recapping Vanderpump Rules as it aired, she explained that she had to hit pause on the coverage due to fans on social media “coming for her” as a parent. “I feel that me as a mother is completely off-limits. And when I see people talking about something they know nothing about, my blood starts to boil,” Lala said. While she admitted that both the cast and viewers may not always “be in alignment” about what occurred on the show this season, she still acknowledged how fans of Vanderpump Rules are the reason for her success. “This show is something I am extremely grateful for. It has allowed me to live a life that I really would sit at home in Utah and dream about. I love making this show,” Lala continued. “The opportunities that have come along with it. It’s not lost on me that the show got me the opportunities, but not only the show, you guys watching the show, you tuning in, you giving a s*** about the show. I am able to provide a beautiful life for not only myself but my family because of you guys.” Lala’s representatives did not immediately respond to The Independent’s request for comment. Was this a semblance of the accountability that fans were craving from Lala? Maybe so. Despite her supposed apology, however, the future of Vanderpump Rules remains uncertain. Even the final episode of season 11 was perceived by viewers as a farewell tribute to the show, in which the last five minutes included an emotional montage set to a piano ballad. Indeed, Lora pointed out that the original premise of Vanderpump Rules was to document young adults “trapped in this arrested development,” and many of them still are – from messy breakups to struggling businesses. That doesn’t mean that some Vanderpump Rules viewers aren’t interested in watching its stars navigate the difficulties of motherhood as well. In fact, that’s partly why fans tune in to Bravo’s extensive Real Housewives franchise in the first place. But on a show like Vanderpump Rules, where taking accountability for one’s actions is a rare occurrance (Jax Taylor, anyone?), perhaps we should be expecting exactly that from even the most self-proclaimed “grown” of its cast members. Join our commenting forum Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today. New to The Independent? Or if you would prefer: Want an ad-free experience? Hi {{indy.fullName}} My Independent Premium Account details Help centre The Hero's Journey (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Part 1‪)‬ The Norton Library Podcast In Part 1 of our discussion on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, we welcome editor Joshua Bennett to discuss Douglass's Narrative as a type of hero's journey, Douglass's political project in writing the book, and how Douglass closes the Narrative with a statement on true Christianity. Joshua Bennett is a professor of literature at MIT. He is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative non-fiction, including The Sobbing School and Being Property Once Myself.To l... More Episodes © 2024 The Norton Library Podcast Advanced Search (Items only) "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano" Image of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano book cover. The Significance of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano My focus for the early modern period is Equiano's narrative, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano .  It was published in 1789, and Equiano was his own publisher. Also, British abolitionists, such as Hannah More, Josiah Wedgwood, and John Wesley, helped him publish his book. They helped collect evidence on the harsh treatment slaves went through and more (Luebering). The narrative is about his experiences as a former African slave. It is significant because it was a pivotal text in the abolitionist movement. It highlighted the harsh and cruel treatment of the transatlantic slave trade. It also challenged other ideas that people had, such as racist ideas and more. It contributed to the bigger belief in human rights and equality. Image of a printing press and a composing stick from the first edition (1768–71) of the Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 3, plate CXLVII, figure 1. Printing Method and Production The narrative was printed using hand letterpress. This method was made by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century. This invention revolutionized book production. His book was manually written by scribes using this tool. Regarding the use of the tool, one arranges individual metal-type characters, punctuation markers, and spaces in a composing stick to form lines of text. It requires skills and accuracy to ensure they have the correct formatting. Then it was transferred to a frame, also known as a chase, and tightly secured to ensure it stayed in place during printing. The ink was applied to the surface, either by ink balls or rollers. Then the inked type was pressed against the paper using this tool. Repeat this process until you finish. Lastly, the pages needed to dry, and be adjusted for the final product. It is labor-intensive but can create numerous books (Lehmann-Haupt). An image of captive Africans being transferred to ships along the Slave Coast for the transatlantic slave trade. Equiano’s Strategies and Influence In the source, “Colonialism, Biblical World-Making, and Temporalities in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative,” Johnson explores how Equiano strategically challenged colonial efforts and Christian narratives, to abolish slavery (Johnson 1011). Equiano lived in London and had to be discreet about his true motives. It is because it was published at a time when people and laws supported colonial and slavery efforts. Also, he was a slave, so he had to be more careful. There would have been more and worse punishments if he was caught. So, he framed his argument in the context of human rights and Christianity to gain support from his readers. He framed it in terms of human rights, arguing that everyone deserves equal rights (morally and ethically correct.) He framed it in Christianity to further appeal to the moral aspects in his reader's minds. Christianity is all about equality and justice, therefore making slavery look terrible. This strategy successfully influenced public opinion and gained support for abolition. The success is also seen with its nine editions and transition to a single volume to reach more people (Johnson 1003). His narrative played a crucial role in shaping public opinion and fostering political activism in the late 18th century (Johnson 1023). Equiano’s Book Tour and Public Engagement There are many ways Equiano spread his book. One way Equiano spread his ideas of ending slavery was through book tours. According to “The Other Interesting Narrative: Olaudah Equiano’s Public Book Tour,” Equiano's book tour from 1789 to 1794 was a huge accomplishment in British history. It was the first modern-style author tour (Bugg 1424). He signed and sold copies at different places, which wasn't common during this time. Also, since it was in person, he could engage with the working-class communities to get their support. The source cites that this was an effective tactic because his book became one of the best-selling in the early 1790s (Bugg 1428). Another way it reached many people was through advertisements and public and private correspondence, further helping his narrative to go global (Bugg 1426). The Atlantic slave trade was part of a profitable network of commerce across the Atlantic Ocean. Goods and enslaved people were traded between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. This network is often called the triangular trade because it had three basic stages that roughly form the shape of a triangle when viewed on a map. Equiano’s Impact The technology and printed press helped spread Equiano’s narrative globally. It significantly impacted the print culture and book history of his time. He reached many people and helped spread political activism. His autobiography played a significant role in shaping print culture. The print culture during this time helped advance many causes, such as political and social. As seen with Equiano, his abolitionist literature played a crucial role. It helped the movement by showing many of the horrors of slavery and advocating for its abolition.  Also, this widespread publication and translation highlight the growing influence of print culture during this time. Equiano's narrative was able to reach many, which was something that was not possible before. Get the Newsletter Please support Game Informer.  Print magazine subscriptions are less than $2 per issue Life is Strange: Double Exposure Revealed We got a first glimpse at the new Life is Strange game at today’s Xbox Showcase. Life is Strange: Double Exposure brings the return of fan-favorite character, Max Caulfield, as she seeks to solve the mystery of her friend’s untimely death. The twist is that she experiences that death in one timeline, and her unusual powers allow her to transition into one where the murder didn’t happen, leaving her to try and figure out what happened, and somehow prevent the death in the first place in both timelines. The new game comes to us courtesy of Square Enix and Deck Nine Games, and is targeting release on Xbox Series X/S and PC on October 29. Products In This Article Life is Strange: Double Exposure Thanks for reading. I’d like to ask you to support Game Informer ’s continued coverage of games with a subscription. For less than two dollars per issue , we mail you a full year of 10 print magazines, each with cover stories and preview features filled with exclusive details about the most exciting upcoming games. We profile and interview game creators. We look back on the rich history of gaming, and we celebrate what’s next. Here on the website, we offer much of our content for free, including game reviews, daily news, videos, event coverage, and more – all with minimal ads. We do so with a small editorial team, alongside contributing paid writers from around the world – over 65 individuals from 9 countries around the world, just in the last couple of years. It’s not possible without support. In a time when game makers and games coverage have faced hard struggles and layoffs, the future of this 30+ year magazine and community is at risk. Our new standalone magazine subscription is the number one way you can keep us alive – and we believe you’ll get a pretty fantastic gaming magazine in your mailbox every few weeks for your trouble. 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Karim Aïnouz directed the film that focuses on the final chapter of the infamous king's life. By Christy Piña Christy Piña Associate Editor Share on Facebook Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Alicia Vikander and Jude Law came out to Tribeca Festival on Tuesday night for the premiere of their upcoming film, Firebrand . The new take on Henry VIII’s life and his six wives focuses on his final spouse, Katherine Parr , who is named regent while the king battles abroad. When he returns ill and paranoid, and his court works to turn him against Katherine, she finds herself fighting for her survival. Related Stories Rosario dawson, jesse williams, aloe blacc among harry belafonte voices for social justice award recipients, 'inside out 2' makes hollywood debut, tribeca festival takes over nyc and this week's best events. “Then also the very simple fact that [Aïnouz] shifted the focus onto Katherine,” the Oscar-nominated actor told The Hollywood Reporter. “So, Henry was a player in a story about a great woman. He’s dominated the narrative of these six women for 500 years, and it was trying to steal back the narrative a little bit and have him be a supporting role to his wife’s story.” Vikander, taking on the role of Katherine, revealed that she was embarrassed to admit she didn’t know more about the final wife of the king besides just that. “She was actually one of the first women to ever be published under her own name,” The Danish Girl Oscar winner told THR . “She was obviously a survivor of Henry VIII, and she outlived him. She was a woman that I just felt it’s important that we tell her story.” Firebrand reunited Law and Vikander for the first time since they worked together on Anna Karenina , which was the Swedish actress’ first English-language film. They looked back on their time on both sets fondly, with the Tomb Raider star sharing that the Fantastic Beasts actor “gave me confidence” on the 2012 film. “We got along very well then,” Law said of his working relationship with his co-star. “We struck a chord really quickly, and I think we both felt very safe very, very quickly. And we both had a desire to push the boundaries [with Firebrand ], feel safe and really get something out of this. She was a really great partner to work with.” The Brazilian director also noted he loved the fact that both characters were so strong and “bigger than life,” which he found exciting. He was especially proud of how the two actors took on the roles of his Katherine and Henry. “It was a dream,” Aïnouz told THR. “I think that there was something about the way that Alicia brings mystery to this character that I think is so important. [Katherine Parr was] always navigating a way to sort of be alive. And I think with Jude, there was something very warm. It’s very interesting to have an actor play a guy that was such a villain but still bring warmth and complexity to it.” Firebrand hits theaters June 14. THR Newsletters Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day More from The Hollywood Reporter Alicia vikander, jude law talk surprising ending of henry viii movie ‘firebrand’, box office: ‘inside out 2’ heading for historic $140m-$150m u.s. opening, a near-record for pixar, china’s leading lights look to shine across the shanghai film fest’s main competitions, shanghai: director rolf de heer on joining competition jury, seeking “new worlds to explore” in cinema, ‘outstanding: a comedy revolution’ review: trailblazing queer comics get their due in entertaining netflix doc, luc besson’s ‘dogman’ kicks off 2024 transylvanian film festival. Personal Perspectives A white woman on a black vacation, i learned a lot about race—and life—in an uncomfortable but incredible place.. Posted June 14, 2024 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods Is it culturally humble to put ourselves in spaces dominated by another race? How can we pay it forward if we do? Here's one author's personal, lived experience. I’ve had a hard crush on Stevie Wonder since forever. As a pre-pubescent teen , I penned my lifetime one-and-only fan letter. “I’m sorry you won’t be able to read this, but…” That was over 40 years ago. Closer to 50 (let’s be honest). Early last year, I asked Alexa about Stevie. “Ziggy (my gender -neutral echo’s name), play Stevie Wonder from 1974.” Riding the wave of smooth, synthed, can’t-help-but-move “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” and “Boogie On Reggae Woman,” I absently googled if Stevie was performing anywhere. A one-week, Caribbean, all-inclusive, Black resort vacation sprung up. Curious, I clicked. “SOLD OUT SOLD OUT SOLD OUT” the screen blared. I turned away, back to work. Then, I found myself back on the webpage. Trip profits benefitted Historically Black College and University (HBCU) scholarships. I filled out an online form to be notified of cancellations, telling myself to let it go. Days later, I hadn’t received so much as a robo-email acknowledging my inquiry. I gnawed thoughts about the trip like my tongue on a rough edge of a tooth. I’d seen a phone number on that website, hadn’t I? I called it. They won’t answer, I told myself. And if they do, the trip is sold out . If there’s room, and this works, I can consider it. If not, time to let go. A southern-accented woman answered the first ring. “Are there openings for the trip?” I blurted. “And is Stevie really playing?” “Yes, there are. And he certainly is!” I was nervous, going alone. I texted close friends and family, all white. They giggled. “I can’t believe you’re doing this!" they effused, “And good for you!” Then they declined to join. My daughters couldn’t leave work, and thought this was cultural appropriation (they had a point). My son-in-law, who is Black, needed to cover someone else’s vacation. I’d feel safer going with him, I admitted. I exchanged several calls with the woman from the website. I was a pain in the proverbial tuchus, but she seemed unconcerned. I needed a balcony, for fresh air. I wanted to be higher up, for quiet. I’m old, privileged, white; even if I don’t always feel white, because I’m Jewish. I pass, and my privilege is evident every time I walk into an upper-crust boutique, trending Portland café, airport, or classroom. Especially living in what is still known as the whitest city in America. I packed plenty of sunscreen, knowing it would be a commodity most wouldn’t need. The hotel lobby buzzed, a packed sea of chatting, animated, vacation-ready people in loose, colorful clothes. None of them white. I stopped, reaching for my phone like some security blanket, snapping a photo and texting my daughters. “I’m afraid I shouldn’t be doing this and it’s totally not cultural humility,” I wrote. They didn’t respond. You knew it would be like this, I told myself. Duh! This exact experience and even your discomfort right now are a big reason you are here. Breathe. I grew up in America. As a preschooler, my father worked on civil rights in the Jewish community, but my mom, professing equality, anxiously insisted, “Lock your doors!” when we drove through inner-city neighborhoods. A woman behind me in the lobby smiled. “Where are you from?” she asked. My shoulders relaxed as we chatted. At the first meal, I smiled when people caught my eye. Most smiled back. Some averted their gaze. Oh shit, I thought. Just by being here, I’m triggering. So not okay. What made me think I could— Or maybe some people aren’t smiley? Or maybe the people that are smiling are reflexively trying to avoid trouble—prioritizing my white comfort over their own? I considered not meeting peoples’ gaze, looking down, going invisible (not so difficult for a 60+ -year-old female in America), but I forced myself. Just try, I thought. This is so not about you. Be a good ally: respectful, humble, supportive. As I bound up and down stairs, everyone piped “Good morning!” or “Hi!” to the point I began doing it too. I worried people’s friendliness came as reflex—my skin a beacon to provoke best behavior. The thought sickened. Then I noticed everyone greeting everyone, everywhere, like friends or family—the pool, the bar, the lobby, the paths. Maybe Black people are just nicer. Definitely more direct. What a pleasure, I caught myself thinking. Then: There it is, systemic, internalized racism : “Maybe Black people are…” As if Black people are any one thing, a monolith. No. “If only we could be this nice and friendly to everyone, all the time,” one person posted on the Facebook page dedicated to this trip. Friendliness was up a notch for everyone—we were on vacation, after all. But it felt warmer, more intimate than trips I’d been on with hegemonic white groups—resorts, business, tours—anything. “Is someone sitting here?” several people asked at meals, seeing me alone. One was an HBCU administrator. Another, the husband of a C-suite executive. All around, it felt normal to be curious. “Can I ask why you came?” a few asked, their directness a relaxing relief. “I came for Stevie,” I admitted. “And to support HBCUs.” Loving Stevie seemed universal. No one so much as intimated it was inappropriate I chose to be there; but maybe they were privileging my comfort. “Everyone is so warm,” I’d say. “Except, maybe I’m imagining, but some avert their eyes—” “That’s on them,” my meal mates suggested. “I want to be respectful though,” I insisted. “I don’t want to trigger people by being here. If that’s the case, I shouldn’t have come.” I tried not to expect appeasement or reassurance—white fragility is exactly that, wanting to be told what’s most comfortable for me. I wanted the truth. And then, toward the end of the week, Stevie. I joined a line outside the venue hours early, at least a hundred people ahead of me. I brought a book but never cracked it, talking instead to a pharmacist about empowering patients with chronic illness . When the doors opened, I strode to the fourth row, inner aisle, close enough to see Stevie, right down to his shoes and socks. He strode onstage arm-in-arm with his assistant and stood, wearing a bright red suit with a rainbow appliqued on the back, the crowd roaring with pleasure. Silent, he sat down, playing the intro to “Close Your Eyes,” dancing his hands over the keys. Quietly, he spoke. “I love you,” he said softly, then began to sing. “Family,” he said mid-set, “we don’t have much time together, so we have some decisions to make. Do you want me to play the song that starts like this—?” he riffed a couple notes of “You and I,” teasing and laughing . “Or this—” he played the first phrase of “Ribbon in the Sky.” “Ok, here’s what we’re going to do,” he grinned. “I like to keep it fair. We’ll do a little bit of ‘You and I’ and a little’ bit of ‘Ribbon in the Sky.’ Because you can’t always have it all the way you want. You have a debate you want to be in? Then you should get up and vote! Ya feel me?” He launched into his number. We heard “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” “ Superstition ,” “Sir Duke,” “Higher Ground,” “Hotter than July,” “Overjoyed,” and so much more. “We can’t put it in the hands of fate,” he paused. “You can put it in the hands of faith, but you can’t put it in the hands of fate. If we want change for the good, for everybody, then we do it. I say to my kids, ‘I know you’ve been taught to “put it in God’s hands.” But you know what? God has given you hands. Use your hands to make a difference…' You feeling it?” We were. We roared. “Then I’ll tell you I love you, and let’s get this thing together!” he yelled. “Put your hands together and clap. Put your hands together and clap!” He guided women and men to sing alternate lines of “If You Really Love Me,” laughing at the intimacy he’d created. He dedicated a song to Tina Turner “and her greatness,” as she had just died, and promised every penny of his proceeds would be sent to HBCUs. “Are y’all good?” he asked. We were. Way too soon, it was over. I miss it. All of it. And yes, I do love you, Stevie. Thank you for stretching me, throughout my life. Forgive me for gatecrashing; I hope I did a creditable, respectful job. I will take the memories and lessons with me, forever. Signed, sealed, delivered: I’m yours. Diane Solomon is an adjunct professor at OHSU and has served as a leader on the Boards of Nurse Practitioners of Oregon, the Oregon Wellness Program, the Oregon Nurses Association, The Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, and many others. Find a Therapist Find a Treatment Center Find a Psychiatrist Find a Support Group Find Online Therapy International New Zealand South Africa Switzerland Asperger's Bipolar Disorder Chronic Pain Eating Disorders Passive Aggression Personality Goal Setting Positive Psychology Stopping Smoking Low Sexual Desire Relationships Child Development Self Tests NEW Therapy Center Diagnosis Dictionary Types of Therapy At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives. Emotional Intelligence Gaslighting Affective Forecasting Neuroscience 468 IMAGES PPT 17 Writing Biographical Stories Biography Narrative Essay How To Write An Biography Essay Firsthand Biographical Narrative What Is A Biographical Narrative? VIDEO Songs of Jewish Polesye trailer The Tragic Tale of Elizabeth Barton: The Nun Who Defied a King #historicalfacts #history #facts Unveiling Stories: THE INDIE BIOGRAPHY FILM by SurfPacific Kayn "Welcome to [Your Channel Name]: The Ultimate Biography Hub" 25 April 2024 COMMENTS Biography biography, form of literature, commonly considered nonfictional, the subject of which is the life of an individual.One of the oldest forms of literary expression, it seeks to re-create in words the life of a human being—as understood from the historical or personal perspective of the author—by drawing upon all available evidence, including that retained in memory as well as written, oral ... Biography Biography, autobiography, and memoir are the three main forms used to tell the story of a person's life. Though there are similarities between these forms, they have distinct differences in terms of the writing, style, and purpose. A biography is an informational narrative and account of the life history of an individual person, written by someone who is not the subject of the biography. Biography in Literature: Definition & Examples A biography (BYE-og-ruh-fee) is a written account of one person's life authored by another person. A biography includes all pertinent details from the subject's life, typically arranged in a chronological order. The word biography stems from the Latin biographia, which succinctly explains the word's definition: bios = "life" + graphia ... The Components of an Intriguing Biography A biography is a story of a person's life, written by another author. The writer of a biography is called a biographer while the person written about is known as the subject or biographee. Biographies usually take the form of a narrative, proceeding chronologically through the stages of a person's life. American author Cynthia Ozick notes in ... Biography in literature Literary biography. A literary biography is the biographical exploration of individuals' lives merging historical facts with the conventions of narrative. Biographies about artists and writers are sometimes some of the most complicated forms of biography. Not only does the author of the biography have to write about the subject of the biography but also must incorporate discussion of the ... Biography Examples and Definition Definition of Biography. A biography is a description of a real person's life, including factual details as well as stories from the person's life. Biographies usually include information about the subject's personality and motivations, and other kinds of intimate details excluded in a general overview or profile of a person's life. biography summary biography, Form of nonfictional literature whose subject is the life of an individual.The earliest biographical writings probably were funeral speeches and inscriptions. The origins of modern biography lie with Plutarch's moralizing lives of prominent Greeks and Romans and Suetonius's gossipy lives of the Caesars. Few biographies of common individuals were written until the 16th century. Biography A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. ... The information can come from "oral history, personal narrative, biography and autobiography" or "diaries, letters, memoranda ... Defining Creative Nonfiction, Narrative Nonfiction, Memoir How do you know if your work is a memoir, biography, or narrative nonfiction? Biographies tend to be sweeping—focusing on the whole life. Memoirs tend to focus on an aspect or time period of a life, though not always. For example, Marley & Me was about his time with the dog—THAT was the aspect. Biography Biography - Narrative, Genre, Today: In the United States, Great Britain, and the rest of the Western world generally, biography today enjoys a moderate popular and critical esteem. In the year 1929, at the height of the biographical "boom," there were published in the United States 667 new biographies; in 1962 exactly the same number appeared, the population in the meantime having ... Memoir, Biography, Narrative Nonfiction—How Are They Different? Memoir is a story based on your life experience and what you have learned from it. It is a winnowing of all that has happened into a tight view of a slim section of experience: the coming of age years; the head-spinning start of a career; early motherhood. But always, it is a winnowing of the vast, complicated arc of events that has constituted ... How to Write a Biography: A 7-Step Guide [+Template] Facebook. These are just some of the story elements you can use to make your biography more compelling. Once you've finished your manuscript, it's a good idea to ask for feedback. 7. Get feedback and polish the text. If you're going to self-publish your biography, you'll have to polish it to professional standards. Life Writing Summary. Since 1990, "life writing" has become a frequently used covering term for the familiar genres of biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, letters, and many other forms of life narrative. Initially adopted as a critical intervention informed by post-structuralist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and especially feminist theory of the ... Story of My Life: How Narrative Creates Personality In the realm of narrative psychology, a person's life story is not a Wikipedia biography of the facts and events of a life, but rather the way a person integrates those facts and events ... How to Write a Biography in 8 Steps (The Non-Boring Way!) Outline your biography, ensuring a logical and engaging narrative flow. Consider the chronological order, significant milestones, and turning points in the subject's life. Organize your gathered information to capture the essence of their journey while maintaining a compelling rhythm throughout. 1 Life Narrative: Definitions and Distinctions Abstract. This chapter explains the ordinary understandings of the concept and practices of self-referential narrative. It distinguishes between autobiographical writing and the practices of related kinds of life writing, namely, biography, the novel, and history writing. An Introduction to Biographical Research Biography's relationship to autobiography, memoir, and narrative research in education is well developed and will continually be redefined (Denzin, 1989; Epstein, 1991; Rollyson, 2008) Yet, with the emerging interest in biographical inquiry and with some growing interest in prosopography (group biography), little consensus of terminology ... What Is a Biography? Definition & 25+ Examples Defining Biography. A biography is a detailed account of a person's life, written by someone other than the subject. The term "biography" is derived from two Greek words: "bio," which means life, and "graphy," which signifies writing. Thus, a biography is the written history of someone's life, offering an in-depth look at their ... Narrative A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether non-fictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.) or fictional (fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller, novel, etc.). Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. Biography Narrative Essay 3. Draft a Short Timeline Before You Write. To make your biography narrative essay a success, draft a short timeline before you write. This timeline could be about the events of the life of the person you are going to be writing or your own if you plan to write an autobiography. Also, drafting your work before finalizing it would make it easier ... What's Your Story? Life as Narrative Source: Unsplash. Whether or not we are truly inventors of our own lives, we certainly are inventors of the story of our lives. For some, this story is clear and in the forefront of their minds ... How to Write a Biographical Narrative Essay A *narrative essay* provides a narrative, or story, to its reader, while a *biographical essay* describes the life of another person. When you write a biographical narrative essay, you are telling the story of another person's life. Before you begin writing, decide what aspects of a person's life you want to ... Life as Narrative LIFE AS NARRATIVE 13 and narrative is a two-way affair: that is to say, just as art imi-tates life in Aristotle's sense, so, in Oscar Wilde's, life imitates art. Narrative imitates life, life imitates narrative. "Life" in this sense is the same kind of construction of the human imagina-tion as "a narrative" is. It is constructed by human beings ... The narrative about motherhood on 'Vanderpump Rules' is entirely wrong Even Lala herself said it in the season 11 finale of Vanderpump Rules: "I have never experienced someone who gets cheated on and suddenly she becomes God.". For Holland, who has chosen to give ... ‎The Norton Library Podcast: The Hero's Journey (Narrative of the Life In Part 1 of our discussion on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, we welcome editor Joshua Bennett to discuss Douglass's Narrative as a type of hero's journey, Douglass's political project in writing the book, and how Douglass closes the Narrative with a statement on true Christianity. Joshua Bennett is a professor of literature ... "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano" The Significance of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. My focus for the early modern period is Equiano's narrative, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.It was published in 1789, and Equiano was his own publisher. Also, British abolitionists, such as Hannah More, Josiah Wedgwood, and John Wesley, helped him publish his book. Life is Strange: Double Exposure Revealed Life is Strange: Double Exposure brings the return of fan-favorite character, Max Caulfield, as she seeks to solve the mystery of her friend's untimely death. The twist is that she experiences that death in one timeline, and her unusual powers allow her to transition into one where the murder didn't happen, leaving her to try and figure out ... The Hidden Life of Joshua Wright, Google's Secret Weapon The Hidden Life of Google's Secret Weapon Joshua Wright cleared a path to domination for the world's biggest tech companies, keeping regulators at bay while juggling inappropriate ... Alicia Vikander, Jude Law on 'Firebrand' Focusing on Katherine Parr Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images. Alicia Vikander and Jude Law came out to Tribeca Festival on Tuesday night for the premiere of their upcoming film, Firebrand. The new take on Henry VIII's life and ... A White Woman on a Black Vacation That was over 40 years ago. Closer to 50 (let's be honest). Early last year, I asked Alexa about Stevie. "Ziggy (my gender -neutral echo's name), play Stevie Wonder from 1974.". Riding the ... essay homework paper phd project resume review speech study thesis