We had an interesting discussion in class last night about autobiographies, after reading Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face.

I actually don’t like reading autobios and personal memoirs that much because they’re not my type of book, but how much detail in most autobiographies are true? Think about how different autobiographies are compared to biographies about the same person. Which account is more interesting to the reader? Why are they different? And if they’re so different, why sell the story in the first place to a particular audience?

How different is a politician’s memoir from a writer’s?

And now that I’ve deluged you with all of these questions, how much of my Distractions post are you willing to believe is true if it happened (which it did) but I was also very selective about which details to include in the story?

Does that change how you read it?