The Dangers of Autobiography

Sometimes there is nothing more fulfilling than recounting your own real-life experiences in a creative way. Telling stories from your own life through the lens of punchy language and narrative structure is tempting, if only because it frames your life as being like a novel or short story. We're writers, we deeply desire the drama and excitement so common in fictional worlds. Indeed there is plenty of drama and excitement in life for those who seek it, but there are also inherent dangers in the creation of creative non-fiction.

In her book "Memory and Imagination", Patricia Hampl explores how the desire and sometimes the structural need to take liberties with the true events of one's life in the writing of autobiographical materials can lead to what basically amount to lies. In the name of clear demonstration and parsimony, whole periods of the writer's life may be amalgamated into a single, partially fictional event. Stumbling, inarticulate conversations will evolve on the page to read like sharp theater and the emotional content of an experience will take shape in ways that are more symbolic than accurate. In essence, the writer chooses art over honesty.

What Hampl doesn't discuss are the potential dangers to the writer him or her self. If I may venture into the perilous realm of autobiography (hopefully with as much truth intact at the end as possible), I want to tell the story of how I learned this difficult lesson.

Once upon a course of several years and many thousands of miles from where I am now, I was an English Writing student at a typical American state university. I took a class in creative non-fiction with a particularly inspiring professor (who has since moved on to better things). Over the two and a half months I spent in that class, I produced three short-form pieces of autobiography. I mined material from some of the most potent emotional experiences of my life. When the course closed and I looked back on my work, I realized that my perceptions of the events about which I wrote had changed. I could no longer feel passionate about events and even individuals that had helped to shape my life.

When I later spoke to my professor about this, he ventured an unsatisfying scientific theory. He said that in shifting my memories over to the more creative part of my brain, I had de-linked those memories from my emotional faculties. Basically, that I had inadvertently triggered a quirk of neurology.

My explanation is far more psychoanalytic, but also less based on conjecture. I had taken events from my real life and sculpted them into works of creative writing. In doing so, I made my memories more fictional than they already were. Unwitting inaccuracies had been exaggerated into wanton fictions and memories of real people had been transformed into characters, myself included. It wasn't so unconscious as an exchange between the left and right hemispheres of my brain. I deliberately fueled each exactingly-crafted line by combusting the honest truth.

Autobiography has its place. Creative non-fiction can be a rewarding exercise. Still, the danger of sacrificing one's self in the process is very real. Be careful, you writers, with what stories you choose to craft. You have no idea what pieces you might lose in the attempt to make your own memories more accessible to outsiders.