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chapter eight Autobiography, Biography, Memory, and the Truth / I haveworked as a writer for most of my life. Like most writers, I have used myown life as a source for the imagination, writing autobiographical novels and short stories, as well as poetry, inspired by lived events and remembered feelings. I have also, late in life, written an autobiography. Having been interviewed frequently, concerning both my life and my written work, I have experienced how easy it is to slip over the boundaries of memory and written work. Did the event happen the way I remember it or the way I wrote it? Can I remember only what I wrote? I have worked and written for forty-three years as a historian. My published work includes a historical biography and a biographical essay on my mother. I have also collected, used, and published many oral histories. The problems connected with using autobiographical sources as a historian have been perplexing. Can diaries and memoirs be trusted as coming closer to the truth than accounts by less self-interested authors? How can they be used without unwittingly reproducing the authors’ biases? How can these accounts be verified or evaluated? A special problem concerned biographies of nineteenth-century women reformers who have experienced special friendships with other women as the main emotional support of their lives. The term “lesbian” and the concept of lesbianism did not then exist, yet such special friendships existed and were recognized by contemporaries as important and positive . In my research and reading notes I began to refer to such women as “woman-oriented women.” Yet biographers of women were strangely silent on the subject. Obviously, there were taboos still operating in the present that needed to be broken. I also feel strongly that it is important for heterosexual feminists to deal with lesbian history and treat it as a normal and legitimate part of the history of women. That is why I have included a discussion of several of these women in this chapter. Biographies and autobiographies tell life stories; they focus on the individual life in history and strive to give that life special meaning. The writing of biographies antedates the writing of autobiographies; the former were generally commissioned by powerful individuals to celebrate and Autobiography, Biography, Memory, and the Truth 131 give form to their heroic exploits. They were instruments for enhancing the power of the powerful, usually kings, rulers, and the heads of religious orders. Autobiographers tell the story of their own life; the subject of the story being also its object. The genre lies across the boundaries of literature and history, and part of its fascination for the reader consists in the challenge to sort out the literary, the fictional, from the historic and verifiable. Autobiographers act on the daring assumption that their stories deserve telling, that they carry special meaning, even though the subject is not necessarily an important and recognized public figure. This lends the autobiographer greater credibility with the reader than has the biographer, who has to rely on external evidence only. Presumably the autobiographer knows his story intimately and will share his private insights with the reader. Who is likely to tell a more truthful story? Considering how closely autobiographers rely on memory, can autobiographies be considered a reliable source for the historian, the teacher, the general reader? I will explore these questions, using representative and well-known examples spanning several centuries. THE EARLIEST AUTOBIOGRAPHIES, written in the Middle Ages, all dealt with religious experiences.The autobiography as the record of the quest of the self-defined individual finds its earliest expression in Saint Augustine’s Confessions.1 Born in North Africa in 354, Augustine was baptized at the age of thirty-three and became a priest four years later. In 396 he became Bishop of Hippo, and he wrote his autobiography as the Vandals invaded the coast of North Africa on their way to attacking Rome. The book is one long dialogue with God. The narrator looks back on his own life and development from the point of view of a devout Christian . More than half of the work is taken up with an extraordinarily detailed and unsparing description of his earlier sinful life and his intellectual struggle to become a Christian. He details his adherence to various doctrines and belief systems he now considers false and describes his inability, even after having become convinced of the rightness of Christian doctrine , to give up his enjoyment of material and sexual...

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