Animal Biographies?

My mom gave me a book to read when I came home for break. The cover looked cute enough and the writing caught my interest. So I began to read The Good God Pig. This book is about more than just a big hungry hairy pig. It deals with a woman and her life, writing, traveling and caring for animals. It goes to show, a bio can take many forms. By writing about her pig Sy Montgomery wrote about her life. One of the least ego-centric bios that I've ever read due to the fact it was autobiographical by proximity. She didn't set out to write about herself, but about her pig. Her life just ended up in the book too.

Lives worth reading?

There are a lot of "autobiographies" out there. Plenty, especially for the famous, are written by ghost writers. It's find perplexing.

Who wants to buy, let alone read Paris Hilton's Biography?

But then I wonder, who would care about my biographical writing? I think it's important for me to not bore my readers. The issues I write about can be related to and I'm writing about what is important to me. So, maybe it's not for everyone. Still less interesting autobiographical writing has been done.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

This memoir was written by blinking. The author, Jean-Dominique Bauby, former editor of french Elle magazine, has a stroke at 43 that left him mentally trapped in his paralyzed body. This memoir is inspiring and tear jerking. It was a best seller, although Bauby died days after its publication. Hollywood turned this into a feature film, see preview below.

The title comes from the experience of the mind vs. the body. " Something like a giant invisible diving bell holds my whole body prisoner... My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or King Midas's court."

There is something sad and beautiful about being trapped in a body but free in one's own thoughts. The book is the last labor of an intelligent and witty writer who met an unfortunate end. I hope someday to read it in the original French.

Past tense

My Mom sent me a letter containing a piece that I wrote when I was around 6 years old. It's about who I admire in my life. I'll post a scan of the paper soon.

"How I Met My Husband"

I read the short story "How I Met My Husband" by Alice Laidlaw. It's an endearing story that talks about the reality of love. It's rarely the grandiose, but the close to home that sticks. I found a summary of the story on a website and it follows.

A typical early story, “How I Met My Husband” introduces a young girl's initiation into adulthood, as narrated by her mature self, and exemplifies the double vision frequently found in Munro's work.

When Edie, a naïve farm girl and high-school dropout, is hired as a maid by the new veterinarian, Dr. Peebles, she is awed by his home's modern conveniences: pink bathroom fixtures, an automatic washer, ice cubes. Edie is keenly aware of society's lofty attitude toward hired help and country people, yet she unconsciously exhibits the same prejudice toward shiftless Loretta Bird, an unwelcome neighbor.

The Peebles family lives across the road from the old fairgrounds where one day a small plane lands, sparking all sorts of conjecture. That afternoon the barnstorming pilot Chris Watters, who offers plane rides for a dollar, seeks permission to use the Peebles's pump and instead finds Edie trying on Mrs. Peebles's long dress and jewelry while the family is gone. Edie is immediately smitten.

When Alice, the pilot's fiancé and a former army nurse, arrives unexpectedly, Dr. Peebles follows local custom by inviting her to stay with them. Tension escalates as Alice tries to convince Chris to marry her, but he is clearly reluctant and soon disappears. Viciously turning on Edie, Alice flounces after him. As Edie waits for Chris's promised letter at the mailbox, she meets a young mail carrier who will soon become her husband. Unlike Alice, Edie decides, “If there were women all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be.”

I'd have to say my favorite part of the story is in the end when she writes "He always tells the children the story of how I went after him by sitting by the mailbox everyday, and naturally I laugh and let him, because I like for people to think what pleases them and makes them happy."

Sometimes the information in an auto-biography doesn't make the people who remember it a certain way happy. How does one write about their life and not alienate the people who remember it a happier or different way. I'm sure there is a balance there, this author just managed to hit it right on.

Mmm Campbell...

This book has a great assortment of pictures, articles and illustrations that give the far fetched tales plausibility.

Definite lines?

Webster dictionary defines autobiography:

au·to·bi·og·ra·phy
Pronunciation: \o-tə-bī-ˈä-grə-fē, -bē-\
Function: noun
Date: 1771
: the biography of a person narrated by himself or herself

Which brings up:

bi·og·ra·phy
Pronunciation: \bī-ˈä-grə-fē also bē-\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s):plural bi·og·ra·phies
Etymology: Late Greek biographia, from Greek bi- + -graphia -graphy
Date: 1683
1 : a usually written history of a person's life
2 : biographical writings as a whole
3 : an account of the life of something (as an animal, a coin, or a building)

A Million Little Lies?

Some of you may have heard of the James Frey autobiography A Million Little Pieces. It was supported by Oprah, but then condemned because it was found out to be exaggerated. I read excerpts from this book and found a very interesting writing format. I felt the writing was sincere and it made me wonder, how are autobiographies verified? Isn't personal memory an inconsistent thing? There must be a line somewhere. If it is essentially your writing, and events of your life, how straightforward and honest must it be to qualify as an autobiography vs. a fiction?

Dahl is awesome!

My conjecture is that, although anyone can write auto-biographically, only the ones by the good authors are the really worth reading. Testing this theory I took up Going Solo by Roald Dahl. If anything it proved to me that a good biography has strong voice and that makes any biographical events worth reading.

Here is a passage that I quite enjoyed:

"I smiled weakly at the Major as he went prancing by, but I didn't pull back. I wanted to see him again. There was something rather admirable about the way he was galloping round and round the deck with no clothes on at all, something wonderfully innocent and unembarrassed and cheerful and friendly. And here I was, a bundle of youthful self-consciousness, gaping at him through the porthole and disapproving quite strongly of what he was doing. But I was also envying him. I was actually jealous of his total don't-give a-damn attitude, and I wished like mad that I myself had the guts to go out there and do the same."

Is it easy?

So, I found this article online and it made me wonder, is this really accurate? The outline is just so general it could be anyone's life and what makes Joe Blow's bio worth reading? Why does a list of events embody a memoir? Is a linear structure of events that important to the genre or is it just a cop out?


Create an Outline for Your Autobiography

By Linda C. Senn

Most projects, especially writing projects, become less intimidating once you’ve set up an outline or framework. Take autobiographies.

If you sit down to keyboard or note pad and just begin, your writing will ramble and wander off to side issues every couple of pages. The stories lose their focus and message when that happens.

What you need to tame that tendency is an outline. Nothing fancy – just a simple list of the stories you want to tell in the order in which you want to write them.

Whether your autobiography will cover your entire life or just a meaningful chunk of it, you can develop a useful framework by going over your life one decade at a time,

Begin with the years birth-10. Opposite each decade jot down the highlights and lowlights of that period. Begin with 3 or 4 specifics, and add more as they occur to you.

Once the framework is in place, you can go through and write about each event listed in whatever order you prefer.

In creating that list, consider the following as starting points:

* houses you’ve lived in,
* traumatic family events,
* life-changing transitions,
* especially exciting events,
* people who have made a difference in your life,
* significant health problems,
* births, marriages, deaths,
* firsts – first job, date, pet, and other firsts,
* vacations,
* Aha! moments,
* spiritual experiences,

... and other highlights and lowlights that had an impact on who you are today.

Once you have that framework or outline in place, writing your autobiography is a matter of telling the story of the events on your list.

© Pen Central Communications 2006

Where to begin...

This is part of an autobiographical graphic novel by Allison Bechdel called Fun House. I figure it's somewhere to start because I'm more famillar with illustrated ones than other with biographical novels. I highly recomend Fun House if you haven't read it already.