Introduction

This introduction examines the theoretical foundations of life-writing practices. It explains why autobiographies are fictional constructs despite their claim to veracity, crafted by authors to project a self that explains how he or she came to be the person he or she is, and that he or she exists on the page by virtue of his or her story by shaping the events of his or her experience. Yet the meaning of lives embedded in life-writing texts is mediated by available cultural models of identity and the discourses in which they are expressed. Life-writing practices have, moreover, been profoundly guided by scholarly thinking about narrative, remembrance and identity. The construction of selfhood cannot proceed without a capacity to narrate, and narration of the self is a story reliant upon memory. The recollections of experiences in our minds are shaped into meaningful patterns of remembrances, and these patterns are constructed in our minds as stories or narratives. It is through memory and narrative, then, that an individual’s identity is constituted. Remembrance is ordered by socially constructed norms and expectations that function as shared frames of understanding for authors, and memory is a projection of these frames into the shared past. Autobiographical authors situate their selves in time and are unconsciously guided by “a narrative identity system” consisting of unspoken, implicit cultural models that are historically and culturally specific and structured by local understandings and expectations.