The Fiction of Autobiography: Reading and Writing Identity

Description

Writing autobiography is a complicated, often fraught activity for both writer and reader. We can find many recent examples of the way such writing calls into question the author's truthfulness or their authority to present as definitive their 'version' of a particular event or portion of their lives. Drawing upon a wide range of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century autobiographical writing, The Fiction of Autobiography examines key aspects of autobiography from the interrelated perspectives of author, reader, critic and scholar, to reconsider how we view this form of writing, and its relationship to the way we understand and construct identity. Maftei considers recent cases and texts such as Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Frey's A Million Little Pieces alongside older texts such as Proust's In Search of Lost Time¸ Nabokov's Speak, Memory and Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In part, this is to emphasise that key issues reappear and arise over decades and centuries, and that texts distanced by time can speak to each other thoughtfully and poignantly. FC Title Page Copyright Contents Introduction 1. Truth and Trust Autobiography as testimony, writing as survival Testimonio as a subgenre The creation of persona 2. Me and Not-Me: Dismissing Unity in Autobiographical Writing Temporal duality 3. The Vortex Effect and The Tissue of Time 4. Inventing the Road With Every Step Conclusions Appendix Job Interview Geneva Summertime Summertime II Commerce Oma and the Wolves Isambard Jewish World Cup New Year’s Eve Hairdresser THE ROAD TRIP Tube Station Venice References Index