Autobiography

[The New One]

What is your view of autobiographies?

[The New One]

Well, my thoughts exactly!

Have you, or are you going to write one Mr Moorcock?

[Mikey_C]

It would be an instant classic! I've ordered it already. :D

[Michael Moorcock]

No plans to write one yet!
Memory's a funny thing. I don't trust my own 100 percent.

[Mikey_C]

Why not make it a fictional autobiography? Might as well be honest!

[Deadwolf]

No plans to write one yet!
Memory's a funny thing. I don't trust my own 100 percent.

hehe yes but otherwize 2000 years from now it'll be so much harder to know the person behind the writtings


if jesus himself woulda wrote about his life it would have saved us LOTS of troubles

[A_Non_Ymous]

Why not make it a fictional autobiography? Might as well be honest!

There's a sense in which any autobiography is fictional, of course! :lol:

Alexandre Pushkin once observed about personal memoires something like, "It is possible in such a form not to lie, but to be sincere is an utter impossibiity."

The form of Mann's Felix Krull is written with an awareness of the uses to which people put such a work, some of the ways they'll "spin" their recollections to their own advantage. I suspect Mann might have been making a sly comment on famous works such as Dichtung und Wahrheit.

LSN

[The New One]

Memory, like all experiences of life is dependant on perception. So any history is but a view at the time it is written. An autobiography is a story of a life from a personal point of view. Absolute truth is not as important as narrative.

[Marca]

I do hate those autobiographies that are written in the style of a novel, complete with dialogue, as if the author has total recall of everything that has happened to them. I'd much rather people be honest and show a bit of memory lapse every now and again

[Typhoid_Mary]

I do hate those autobiographies that are written in the style of a novel, complete with dialogue, as if the author has total recall of everything that has happened to them. I'd much rather people be honest and show a bit of memory lapse every now and again

I hate that too. I was just about to read War Junkie by Jon Steele until I realised that it was written like a bad action novel.

[Doc]

No plans to write one yet!
Memory's a funny thing. I don't trust my own 100 percent.

It seems like much of Mother London and King of the City are autobiographical, although not autobiographies. Death is No Obstacle, too.

Sometimes reading between the lines of a life can give you a clearer picture, anyway. As LSN alludes to, self-awareness of position often distorts accuracy, let alone truth.

[Michael Moorcock]

This site probably contains a lot of autobiography, too! Recently Dave Britton and John Davey have collected a vast amount of my old stuff, including a lot of stuff I did for fanzines in the fifties. It's surprising how I've got dates wrong but Dave believes my actual logic and enthusiasms remain consistent. Not having much material from that period myself, I suppose I haven't been able to check so readily. Once I get into the 60s things become clearer, because there are more means of checking that period from my own file copies of NW, for instance. I can at least see what I was doing at any given time, when I wrote certain things and so on. Knowing when I wrote something also enables me to check what I was doing, who I was seeing and so on. But my own levels of self-deception in certain personal relationships continue to shock me when I look back. I've always considered myself a fairly conscientious person,
though otherwise flawed, but even when I thought I was facing certain important issues, I probably wasn't really facing them at all. I know this is common and what we forgive in others we are less inclined to forgive in ourselves. The literary device, Adlerian, of revealing a character's true story through his or her lies goes back almost as far as the novel itself. As usual, in my view, the novelist anticipates the psychiatrist. Yet psychiatry has become a very useful tool in the novelist's kit.

[The New One]

Fascinating!

I have long thought any creativity, writing or otherwise a voyage of self discovery. A novel has lives lived in a made up world of dreams yet in so creating do we ever leave ourselves behind? Or are we describing another aspect of ourselves hidden deep in our psyche?

Within our minds there is no doubt for me a collective consciousness that when reached pulls on the strings of all concerned. You Mr Moorcock I believe with your fine imagination and ability to convey it in the literary form appeal to many thinkers and lovers of the fantasy and Sci/Fi arena.

Your autobiography is already written in the writings you have produced thus far. I for one enjoy immensely meeting you in your many guises as The Eternal Champion! I look forward to new incarnations you are yet to reach! Multiverse indeed!

[Anonymous]

No plans to write one yet!

You sayin the Second Ether isn't your autobiography??

:oops:

[Michael Moorcock]

OK. No plans to write another one.