AUTOBIOGRAPHY. (from the Greek AUTOS: the self, BIOS: life and GRAPHEIN: to write) is a biography written by the subject herself. If a biography generally relies on a wide range of documents, sources and viewpoints, an autobiography may be based entirely on the writer’s memory. In this way, autobiography is much like self-portraiture. Roland Barthes once said, “Any time a subject steps in front of a camera to have his portrait taken, four people show up: who that individual thinks he is, who he wants others to think he is, who the photographer thinks the subject is and whom the photographer will try to make use of to bring about his art.” In the case of autobiography, the subject and the photographer are one and the same, in essence a written(or spoken) form of telling your own story. This form is about putting yourself in your work.

Autobiography also has a new and contemporary dimension. The Internet and other new media have empowered ordinary people to document their own lives in real time. As Virginia Heffernan wrote in the New York Times Magazine, the current generation has “become the ultimate multimedia curators, fanatical archivists and tireless autobiographers.”

 

We relate to the world and our place in it by writing, constructing and make-believing our personal narratives. In the end the "true" nature of the autobiographical form is closer to fiction than to fact as it is based on who we want to be rather then who we are.

 

link to FICTION