OBJECTIVES:

a) Distinguish memoir, biography and

autobiography from each other
b) Describe the good qualities of a good memoir,
biography, and autobiography, and
c) Write a 750-word memoir relating to their most
memorable/ unforgettable life event
LIFE STORIES

Memoir. Biography. Autobiography.

 The story of one’s life can be told in three ways: as a
memoir, biography or autobiography.

If you write about your life, it is either a memoir or

autobiography.
If someone else has written about your life, it is
biography.

These 3 subgenres of life story look at who we are as

humans and the life we have lived.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
(the complete story of the author’s life)

Autobiography: Greek words (autos-self, bios-life and graphe-writing)

Autobiography spans the life of the writer from birth to the present.

To write one’s autobiography is to publicly share one’s life. Some write it to

correct public perception about them.

“I wanted to set the record straight. I wanted to tell my own story, not let
people tell it to me.” –Mark Obama Ndesanjo (to counter Dreams from My
Father by Barrack Obama (1995))
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
(the complete story of the author’s life)

Most autobiographers choose epiphanies, or recalled moments or events

later realized to be significant. Keep in mind that these life moments are
meaningless by themselves It is up to the writer to assign meaning to them.

Example is The Confession of St. Augustine (mother’s BM into a god-given

food that nourished his infancy)

CONFESSIONAL WRITING:
Is a style of writing that exposes the most intimate and hidden facts about the
writer, particularly those considered as taboo, forbidden, or sinful.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
(the complete story of the author’s life)

Being a complete life story, autobiographers give the reader a holistic picture
of who, what and how the writers became such a person.

Remembering is not only for the sake of recreating past events, but also for
transmitting lessons about life itself.

Autobiographers supplement the process of recalling their past life with

journals, diaries, photographs, memoirs, or interviews.
BIOGRAPHY
(a life story by another writer)

If you cannot write your own life story, you can ask somebody else do it. This means allowing
this somebody to ask you a lot of things about your life and answering them honestly.

BIOGRAPHY: Greek words (bio-life, graphia-written account) also includes the time and place
the particular person has lived. The biographers subject does not exist in a vacuum. The
subject has lived in a particular time and place, which shaped who they were and why they
became such a person.

SUCCESS OR FAILURE OF THE BIOGRAPHER

The biographer strives to transform information into insight, understanding, and awareness as
attested by available data. Inventing or suppressing facts for dramatic effects is failure of
truth. Merely recounting the facts is failure of creativity. A SUCCESSFUL BIOGRAPHER IS
INFORMATIVE AND CREATIVE.
BIOGRAPHY
(a life story by another writer)

A. Margaret Button’s Notable Women of Modern China

Primary motivation was the great interest of the American public about the lives of
Chinese women whose life is “largely unwritten” particularly those living in China.
One of her sketches is Dr. Mary Stone: With Unbound Feet

B. Jacob Abbot’s Cleopatra (1860)

Historical biography that portrays the last queen of Egypt in dramatic and riveting
manner. He opened it with the lines, “ The story of Cleopatra is a story of a crime.”

C. Rose Wilder Lane’s Henry Ford’s Own Story (1917)

The American industrialist and car-maker Henry Ford did not invent the car. He made cars
affordable to the average person by maximizing the assembly line as an industrialprocess of
manufacturing.
MEMOIR
(a partial story of the author’s life)

Memoir: French word for memory

To write a memoir is to write what you remember. In a memoir, you become

the narrator and the main character. You are the central force of the life story
as you recount what happened in the past and what it means to you in the
“now”. In a memoir, you assume the first person point of view. You are the “I”.

A memoir is deeply rooted in one’s personal experience, which makes it

similar to autobiography.

“But unlike autobiography, which spans an entire lifetime, a memoir assumes

the life and ignores most of it.” – William Zinsser, 2001
MEMOIR
(a partial story of the author’s life)

If your life is a cake, a memoir is only a slice of that cake. As with a cake, you
can cut your life into more than one slice, thus coming up with several
memoirs. Each slice represents a different time in your life.

A good memoir invites the readers to contemplate with the narrator the
remembered events and their importance. A good invitation includes vivid
descriptive details, a plot that moves from scene to scene, a conversational
tone, and a central theme that demonstrates the writer’s transformation. To
accept that invitation is to read into the private and intimate moments of the
memoirist. Afterwards, your literary mind will also become filled with memories
of the recounted events by the writer.
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
Memoirs of my Life and Writings, and The Private Tutor

How did the memoir writers

a) recall the past events in their lives;
b) fill the missing gaps in their memories; and
c) write in a creative manner.
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
Memoirs of my Life and Writings, and The Private Tutor

Memory is not exact and precise. Factual details, unless verified in

written sources such as letters, diaries, or photographs, might be
imprecise. But don’t be discouraged nor force yourself to remember.
Your literary mind shapes these incomplete details. Memoir,
therefore, preserves those events in your life that might be forgotten.
It completes something in your life that might have remained
incomplete had you not written a memoir. Nevertheless, a memoir
remains a partial life story of the person who wrote it.