ABSTRACT
It is in Aristotle’s Poetics1 that we find an account of narrative rich enough to
account for the deep and abiding interest we take in the stories of lives past and
present. With this interest we tend to bring strong intuitions concerning the
distinction between the truth or falsity of any given life-narrative: veracity is a
function of, as the phrase goes, ‘‘telling it like it was.’’ And false narrative con-
tent is, conversely, made false by virtue of deviation from this verisimilitude. But
we also sense a difficulty with maintaining this simplistic criterion when the
subject turns from biographical to autobiographical narratives. The problem we
sense was encapsulated by Wittgenstein in 1937: ‘‘You cannot write anything
about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are. That is the difference
between writing about yourself and writing about external objects. You write
about yourself from your own height. You don’t stand on stilts or on a ladder
but on your bare feet.’’2
