Our own romantic fiction

Jacques Bonnet

And as for autobiography, it is no more than a pernicious variant of romantic fiction.

Jacques Bonnet, Phantoms on the Bookshelves

Putting a life into a book, whether your own life or somebody else's, must necessarily be selective. It would take as much time to write a complete life story (or read it) as it took to live the life. Selectivity means not just deciding what to put in but also what to leave out.

Biographers are always going to focus on those parts of a life that are most documented by letters, diaries, public records, memories of other people, newspaper accounts, etc. What happened behind closed doors is much harder to write about and usually must either be ignored or guessed at. Writers may also choose to ignore those documented parts of a subject's life that are uninteresting or don't happen to fit into the chosen narrative.

As for those who write autobiographies and memoirs, they are most likely to omit or downplay their own failures and embarrassments, or color them in the most flattering way possible. Everyone is the hero of their own story, and so the story is shaped to make the hero look like a hero. Jacques Bonnet calls this "romantic fiction." Autobiography puts the focus on the good parts, the interesting parts, the noble parts, the amusing parts. It may all be true, but it is never the whole truth, not even those supposedly tell-all memoirs.

A year ago I wrote my own brief autobiography, something to leave my family so that I will be more than a memory to my grandchildren and more than a name to my great-grandchildren. Mostly I just wanted to tell my stories, and like everyone else, I have some good ones. They are all true, at least in so far as my memory is true, but still, yes, some of them probably qualify as romantic fiction.