ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses writing of a statement about a life writing text in poetry or prose. The first decision to make before formulating one's own statement is whether one intends to experiment with autobiographical or biographical writing. More generally, most life writing narratives explore the sense of time and history moving on — issues associated with ethnicity or sexuality may be particularly relevant. Focused exploration of one of these issues, perhaps in a way that ranges more widely than one's own individual experience, would provide a way of stimulating recognition, and interest for the readers. The act of memory itself can be a compelling and universalising component of autobiography. All autobiographies depend upon memory, though to varying degrees. No history, especially a narrative one, can escape the charge that it is, on some level, a fiction, an inexact blending of a writer’s subjective choices, interests, and prejudices with the data of the documentary record.
