Autobiography… Call for new reading practices….

Having recently completed a unit in Autobiography at Southern Cross University, I was very interested in researching just how of Auto/Biography/Memoir(s) is fact or fiction, truth or falsity.

The two texts that I studied were:

Close A (2008) Before You Met Me: A Memoir of One Man’s Troubled Search for Love, North Sydney: William Heinemann.

 

Langford Ginibi R (2007) All My Mob, St Lucia, Queensland: UQP.

Is there Truth in Auto/Biography or is it all fiction?  Ruby Langford Ginibi writes that she doesn’t “write fiction’ while Alan Close notes that “all stories ARE fiction, whether they are true or not”

In my research and the subsequent paper that I wrote for that subject, I came to the following conclusion…  

In conclusion, the notion of truth in life writing remains a much contested space that is at times abused and other times, unwittingly misused by authors and publishers. Despite this Hobbs affirms that while the lines between fiction and life writing have blurred and wavered, the ‘autobiographical pact’ and the ‘truth’ remains the benchmark for life writing (Hobbs 2005, p.32). That said, Gutkind (1997, p.121) posits that the truth is often ‘larger than any single fact, not a cut and dried positive and negative value. It is quite elusive and, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder’. In this quest for truth, Watson & Sidonie (1992, p.xiv) call for ‘standpoint’ reading practices whereby different texts from different locales are interpreted through the development of theories appropriate to the reading of those texts. In this way, it becomes possible to decolonise Ruby’s memoir and Alan’s memoir as texts that hold their own truth within the private space in which they are written, moving away from the ‘universal’ politicised space from which they are traditionally judged (Watson & Sidonie 1992) and in so doing, collapsing the binary opposites of truth and falsity, fact and fiction.

 

References…

Watson J & Sidonie S (1992) ‘De/colonization and the Politics of Discourse in Women’s Autobiographical Practice’, in De/colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.