2011.01.01: January 1, 2011: Paul Theroux writes: The Trouble With Autobiography

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Paul Theroux writes: The Trouble With Autobiography

Paul Theroux writes: The Trouble With Autobiography

"The more I reflect on my life, the greater the appeal of the autobiographical novel. The immediate family is typically the first subject an American writer contemplates. I never felt that my life was substantial enough to qualify for the anecdotal narrative that enriches autobiography. I had never thought of writing about the sort of big talkative family I grew up in, and very early on I developed the fiction writer's useful habit of taking liberties. I think I would find it impossible to write an autobiography without invoking the traits I seem to deplore in the ones I've described-exaggeration, embroidery, reticence, invention, heroics, mythomania, compulsive revisionism, and all the rest that are so valuable to fiction. Therefore, I suppose my Copperfield beckons." Author Paul Theroux served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi in the 1960's.

Paul Theroux writes: The Trouble With Autobiography

The Trouble With Autobiography
Novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux examines other authors' autobiographies to prove why this piece will suffice for his

* By Paul Theroux

* Smithsonian magazine, January 2011

I was born, the third of seven children, in Medford, Massachusetts, so near to Boston that even as a small boy kicking along side streets to the Washington School, I could see the pencil stub of the Custom House Tower from the banks of the Mystic River. The river meant everything to me: it flowed through our town, and in reed-fringed oxbows and muddy marshes that no longer exist, to Boston Harbor and the dark Atlantic. It was the reason for Medford rum and Medford shipbuilding; in the Triangular Trade the river linked Medford to Africa and the Caribbean-Medford circulating mystically in the world.

[Excerpt]

What is more autobiographical than the sort of travel book, a dozen tomes, that I have been writing for the past 40 years? In every sense it goes with the territory. All you would ever want to know about Rebecca West is contained in the half-million words of Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, her book about Yugoslavia. But the travel book, like the autobiography, is the maddening and insufficient form that I have described here. And the setting down of personal detail can be a devastating emotional experience. In the one memoir-on-a-theme that I risked, Sir Vidia's Shadow, I wrote some of the pages with tears streaming down my face.

The assumption that the autobiography signals the end of a writing career also makes me pause. Here it is, with a drum roll, the final volume before the writer is overshadowed by silence and death, a sort of farewell, as well as an unmistakable signal that one is "written out." My mother is 99. Perhaps, if I am spared, as she has been, I might do it. But don't bank on it.

[Excerpt]

The more I reflect on my life, the greater the appeal of the autobiographical novel. The immediate family is typically the first subject an American writer contemplates. I never felt that my life was substantial enough to qualify for the anecdotal narrative that enriches autobiography. I had never thought of writing about the sort of big talkative family I grew up in, and very early on I developed the fiction writer's useful habit of taking liberties. I think I would find it impossible to write an autobiography without invoking the traits I seem to deplore in the ones I've described-exaggeration, embroidery, reticence, invention, heroics, mythomania, compulsive revisionism, and all the rest that are so valuable to fiction. Therefore, I suppose my Copperfield beckons.




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Headlines: January, 2011; RPCV Paul Theroux (Malawi); Figures; Peace Corps Malawi; Directory of Malawi RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Malawi RPCVs; Writing - Malawi





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Story Source: Smithsonian Magazine

This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; Figures; COS - Malawi; Writing - Malawi

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