Pursue

Lesson 1: Life Stories

The story of one’s life can be told three ways: as a memoir, biography, or autobiography.
If you write about your life, it is either a memoir or autobiography. If someone else has
written about your life, it is biography.
These three sub-genres of life story look at who we are as humans and the life we have
lived. Let’s study each one of them to see how writing can relive a life lived.
Memoir
A partial story of the author’s life
Memoir is the French word for memory. To write a memoir is to write what you remember.
In a memoir, you become the narrator and the main character. You are the central force of
the life story as you recount what happened in the past and what it means to you in the
“now”. In a memoir, you assume the first-person point of view. You are the “I”.
A memoir is deeply rooted in one’s personal experience, which makes it similar to
autobiography. In fact, memoir and autobiography are sometimes used interchangeably.
William Zinsser, an American writer, literary critic, and teacher (2001), writes a clear-cut
distinction between the memoir and autobiography: “unlike autobiography, which spans
an entire lifetime, a memoir assumes the life and ignores most of it.”
If your life is a cake, a memoir is only a slice of that cake. As with a cake, you can cut your
life into more than one slice, thus coming up with several memoirs. Each slice represents
a different time in your life. An English historian and writer, Edward Gibbon’s Memoirs
of My Life and Writing (1796) provides an example of a memoir divided into several slices.
He wrote his memoirs at the age of 52. In the excerpts below, Gibbons recounts his “infant
reason” and his experiences with formal education, from having a private tutor to his
admission to the Oxford University.

Memoirs of My Life and Writings (an excerpt)

Edward Gibbon
…As soon as the use of speech had prepared my infant reason for the admission of knowledge,
I was taught the arts of reading, writing and arithmetic. So remote is the date, so vague is the
memory of their origin in myself, that, were not the error corrected by analogy, I should be
tempted to conceive them as innate. In my childhood I was praised for the readiness with which
I could multiply and divide, by memory alone, two sums of several figures; such praise
encouraged my growing talent; and had I preserved in this line of application, I might have
acquired some fame in mathematical studies.
After this previous institution at home, or at a day school of Putney, I was delivered at the age
of seven into the hands of Mr. John Kirkby, who exercised about eighteen months the office of
my domestic tutor… One day reading prayers in the parish church, he most unluckily forgot
the name of King George: his patron, a loyal subject, dismissed him with some reluctance, and
a decent reward; and how the poor man ended his days I have never been able to learn… A man
who had thought so much on the subjects of language and education was surely no ordinary
preceptors: my childish years, and his hasty departure, prevented me from enjoying the full
benefit of his lessons; but they enlarged my knowledge of arithmetic, and left me a clear
impression of the English and Latin rudiments…
My studies were too frequently interrupted by sickness; and after a real or nominal residence at
Kingston School of near two years, I was finally recalled (Dec. 1747) by my mother’s death, in
her thirty-eighth year. I was too young to feel the importance of my loss; and the image of her
person and conversation is faintly imprinted in my memory…
The curiosity, which had been implanted in my infant mind, was still alive and active; but my
reason was not sufficiently informed to understand the value, or to lament the loss, of three
precious years from my entrance at Westminster to my admission at Oxford. Instead of repining
at my long and frequent confinement to the chamber or the couch, I secretly rejoiced in those
infirmities, which delivered me from the exercises of the school, and the society of my equals…

A good memoir invites the readers to contemplate with the narrator the remembered events
and their importance. A good invitation includes vivid descriptive details, a plot that moves
from scene to scene, a conversational tone, and a central theme that demonstrates the
writer’s transformation. To accept that invitation is to read into the private and intimate
moments of the memoirist. Afterwards, your literary mind will also become filled with
memories of the recounted events by the writer.
It is surprising to learn that the big, plump and imposing adult Gibbon, was a sickly child.
Cultured and very scholarly, the young Gibbon manifests dislike of schools and the
company of the educated and the culturally refined of the English society. These are just
some of the traits that Gibbon wrote with honesty and a firm grasp of recall in his memoir.
He provides readers with a diligent and intimate examination of his formative years and
adulthood.
Gibbon was a British historian and politician. His most important piece of writing is the
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His Memoir of My Life and Writings
is considered a great literary masterpiece for its frankness and intellectual depth.
Although factual details in memoirs, unless verified in written sources such as letters,
diaries, or photographs, might be imprecise, these preserves the events in your life that
might be forgotten. It completes something in your life that might have remained
incomplete had you not written a memoir. Nevertheless, a memoir remains a partial life
story of the person who wrote it.
Autobiography
The complete story of the author’s life
As a term, autobiography is a combination of three Greek words: autos (self), bios (life),
and graphe (writing). Simply defined, autobiography spans the life of the writer from birth
to the present. Early childhood has already prepare us to tell an autobiography. No wonder
we have a literary mind.

The Autobiographical Memory

Around the age of three or four, you begin to build the “autobiographical memory.” You start
by telling others about some life experiences, and these are ‘filed in your store of memories’.
During adolescence, you start shaping your identity by telling others what you want to be upon
growing up. It is during the teenage years that you start to become ‘author of your life story.’
As you become a young adult, you are more aware of changes in your life. These changes
develop into significant life events in the story of your life. In turn, these significant life events
become part of your immediate past, and you have a sense of how they have influenced your
present life.
In middle age, when you have lived half of your life, you begin to reflect on your failures and
accomplishment. By this time, you begin to think if your story line fits with how you planned it
in the past and how it turned out in the present. For some, life may have become better than
before. For others, it might have turned out worse, and it might inspire them to change their
story line by making their life better.
By the time you reach old age, or nearing the end of your life, it will become clear to you that
your life story has a beginning, a middle, and ending.

One’s life story is, of course, a private affair, so why write it for others to read? When you
read an autobiographical work, you become intimately acquainted with an entirely new
person. This person could be someone famous, a well-known public figure whom you wish
to know more about. The person could also be someone obscure whom you would not have
known about had you not read his or her autobiography.
To write one’s autobiography is to publicly share one’s life. Some write autobiography to
right public perception about them. For example, Mark Obama Ndesanjo, the half-brother
of the US president Barack Obama, wrote An Obama’s Journey: My Odyssey of Self-
Discovery across Three Cultures (2014) because “I wanted to set he record straight. I
wanted to tell my own story, not let people tell it to me.” Part of setting the record straight
is to counter Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995), which omits
references to their alcoholic and abusive father. Obama’s father, in fact, killed a man, and
eventually killed himself while driving drunk at the age 46. (No, President Obama did not
lie, he chose what truth to tell in his memoir.)
Most autobiographers choose epiphanies, or recalled moments or events later realized to
be significant. Keep in mind that these life moments are meaningless by themselves. It is
up to the writer to assign meaning to them. Pay attention to the manifestation of epiphany
in The Confession of St. Augustine (written in AD 401), which is considered to be the first
complete autobiography.

The Confession of St. Augustine (an excerpt)

St. Augustine
For what would I say, O Lord my God, but that I know not whence I came into this dying life
(shall I call it?) or living death. Then immediately did the comforts of Thy compassion take me
up, as I heard (for I remember it not) from the parents of my flesh, out of whose substance Thou
didst sometime fashion me…
For neither my mother nor my nurses stored their own breasts for me; but Thou didst bestow
the food of my infancy through them, according to Thine ordinance… For they… willingly
gave me what they abounded with from Thee. For this my good from them, was good for
them… This I since learned, Thou through these Thy gifts, within me and without, proclaiming
Thyself unto me. For then I knew but to suck; to repose in what pleased, and cry at what
offended my flesh; nothing more…
Thus, little by little, I became conscious where I was; and to have a wish to express my wishes
to those who could content them, and I could not; for the wished were within me, and they
without; nor could they by any sense of theirs enter within my spirit.
So I flung about at random limbs and voice, making the few signs I could, and such as I could,
like, though in truth very little like, what I wished. And when I was not presently obeyed (my
wishes being hurtful or unintelligible), then I was indignant with my elders for not submitting
to me, with those owing me no service, for not serving me; and avenged myself on them by
tears. Such have I learnt infants to be from observing them; and that I was myself such, they,
all unconscious, have shown me better than my nurses who knew it.
And, lo! My infancy died long since, and I live.
Being a complete life story, autobiographies give the reader a holistic picture of who, what,
and how the writers became such a person. Their autobiographies express their inner
thoughts. As such, their accounts about the past are carefully selected and written with the
use of reflection and insights. Remembering is not only for the sake of recreating past
events, but also for transmitting lessons about life itself. The autobiographers supplement
the process of recalling their past life with journals, diaries, photographs, memoirs, or
interviews. These help in giving a more accurate account of one’s life story.
In writing autobiography, you are more of a ‘truth-seeker’ than a ‘truth-teller.’ As you write
your life story, you will eventually discover the meaning of your life. As others read it,
they may also find the truth of their own lives as they draw lessons from yours. Being a
famous (or notorious) person, people would really be interested to read about your life.
This is also enough reason to write an autobiography. But the most important reason for
writing an autobiography is to assert your life’s significance and to serve as an inspiration
to others.
Biography
A life story by another writer

Biography in the Philippines

The history of biography in the Philippines can be read in epics, ballads, and other orally
transmitted stories about mythical or historical figures. These stories tell about how to
characterize an ‘exemplary life.’ Children, particularly young boys, heard stories about
headhunting, fending off raiders, and avenging ‘slights and insults.’ Exposure to Spain’s
religious and cultural traditions also introduced the Philippines to the European form of
biography, which narrated the life of an individual in search of fulfillment.
European biographies were part of the reading list of wealthy and not so wealthy Filipinos,
from Rizal to Bonifacio, Rizal’s father read to him the biographies of Alexander the Great and
Napoleon Bonaparte. Bonifacio’s small library included Life of the Presidents of the United
States and five fictional biographies.

If you cannot write your own life story, you can ask somebody else to do it. This means
allowing this somebody to ask you a lot of things about your life and answering them—
honestly. Would you? The Chinese women in Margaret E. Burton’s Notable Women of
Modern China (1912) were her Chinese friends whom she treats with sensitivity while
maintaining readers’ interest in them.
Button’s primary motivation in writing this book, which she calls “sketches,” was the great
interest of the American public about the lives of Chinese women whose life is ‘largely
unwritten,’ particularly those living in China. Prior to writing these biographical sketches,
Button had spent some time in China where she found Chinese women’s achievements and
involvement impressive.
Upon her return to America, she talked to several Chinese women whom she thought
“fairly present” the educated women of China, hence, the title of her book. For this book,
Button also obtained letters and photographs that allowed her to write with “definite
information.”
Let us take a closer look at one of those biographical sketches.

Dr. Mary Stone: With Unbound Feet (an excerpt)

Margaret Button
On the “first day of the third moon” of the year 1873, a young Chinese father knelt by the side
of his wife and, with her, reverently consecrated to the service of the Divine Father the little
daughter who had that day been given them. They name her “Maiyu,”— “Beautiful Gem”—
and together agreed that this perfect gift should never be marred by the binding of the little feet.
It was unheard of!
… But as she approached the age when custom required that her feet should be bound, the little
girl discovered that the way of the pioneer is not an easy one. The unbound feet were a constant
source of comment and ridicule, not only by older girl, who taunted her with her “big feet” and
refused to let her pass unless she would kneel down and render obeisance to her own bandaged
stumps…
Maiyu’s father and mother never reconsidered their decision that their daughter should grow to
womanhood with natural feet; but they did try to devise some plan by which her life might be
a useful and happy one, even though she might never enjoy the blessing of a mother-in-law…
This was almost as startling as the unbound feet!
A Chinese woman physician was unknown and undreamed of. But this young father’s faith in
the possibilities of Chinese womanhood was not to be discouraged. The necessity of general
education, preliminary to medical training, was explained, and Maiyu was put in charge of Miss
Howe, then at the head of the Girl’s Boarding School of the Methodist Mission. In this school
she spent most of the next ten years of her life, studying in both Chinese and English, and fitting
herself under Miss Howe’s direction for her medical course…
During her medical course Mary became more strongly impressed than ever before with the
evils of foot-binding. Her mother’s feet had, of course, been bound in childhood, and although
Mrs. Stone had never bound the feet of any of her daughters, she had not unbandaged her own.
But while Mary was pursuing her medical studies, she became convinced that the time had
come when her mother ought to register a further protest against the harmful custom, by
unbandaging her own feet, and wrote urging her to do so. Mrs. Stones really agreed to this…
The last shoes worn before the unbinding, and the first after it, were sent to Ann Arbor to the
daughter who has so long been a living exponent of the doctrine of natural feet.

Biography, derived from the Greek bio (life) and graphia (written account), also includes
the time and place the particular person has lived. In short, the biographer’s subject does
not exist in a vacuum. The subject has lived in a particular time and place, which shaped
who they were and why they became such a person. Steve Jobs lived during a time of
computer and technological innovations, in a place now associated with both: Silicon
Valley. In high school, he saw classmates who were either into arts and literature or
electronics. He decided to embrace both; he read science and technology, Shakespeare,
novels, and poems. The biographer’s task, therefore, is to bring the readers to the time and
place of the subject.
Though chronological order (birth, work, death) marks the passage of life, a chronological
order of events will not show the journey of one’s life. What is shows are simply facts with
no story being told. A Greek American author and columnist Arianna Huffington, in
writing the biography of the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, writes:
I was brought up, like so many of my generations, to see Picasso as the most original, the most
seductive and certainly the most idolized artist of the twentieth century… The man who appeared
to be a towering creative genius one moment turned into a sadistic manipulator the next. There
was a great deal more evidence of Picasso the destroyer which I came upon unexpectedly in the
course of the hundreds of interviews conducted in Paris, Barcelona, the South of France or
wherever we could find those who knew Picasso during his life who revealed facts that fleshed out
the dark side of his genius…
Facts have their own undeniable authority. They are woven together by the cluster of convictions,
emotions and ideas that, knowingly or unknowingly, for good or ill, form the biographer’s vision
of life and the world. In telling Picasso’s story, I have been guided by a statement of his: “What is
necessary is to speak about a man as though painting him.” To try to remain anonymous, out of
hatred or respect, is to do the very worst. You’ve got to be there, to have the courage; only then
can it become interesting and bring forth something.” I put myself in it.

In autobiography, the writer is the “I.” In biography, the writer is an “eye” that selects,
edits, and arranges assorted documents, events, and accounts into one compelling story.
Facts are the painting materials that need a painter—a storyteller.