Writing Your Autobiography

Another Pittsburgh Post-Gazette OpEd of Long Ago.

First Person: A life's story / The pleasures and perils of writing your autobiography
Saturday, January 10, 2004

By Rudolph Weingartner

Nothing quite resembles writing an autobiography. Anyone tempted to tell his or her life story might be interested to hear something of the kinds of decisions I faced in writing and publishing such a tome.

I wanted to write a chronicly piece that "gets it all down," not a memoir focused on a theme or period. (A commercial publisher, I knew, would take such a book only if it told a gripping tale or were written by someone whose very name sells books.) But of course there is no "all." To whatever is written, still one further fact or event might be added. There is always a need to select. But with scholarly subjects (the breeding habits of field mice) or with journalistic ones (the trial of Andrea Yates), numerous principles of selection are embedded in the subject, guiding the author as to what to include and leave out.

When I called my book "Mostly About Me," I knew well that "Me" is not a rule-governed subject. What I would write about and in what detail was entirely my decision. What had a significant influence on my life? What do I want readers to know about me? What do I want to brag about? (Be sure that braggadocio is a motive.) And what might be of interest to the reader, especially including one's life's shadier sides? These are some of the criteria and they are not necessarily compatible.

But there is also a far less voluntary "principle" of selection: what and how the writer remembers the past, sometimes augmented by a written record or consultation with other witnesses. For me, both of these enhancements were limited, consisting of spotty, ill-organized files and a paucity of remaining informants. The subjectivity of my own recollections took over. By focusing for several weeks on a single period, my mind would be jogged into remembering what was not at first available to me.

But memory is notoriously fallible. Thus, even though what I set down becomes the "official" record whenever my discourse is the only written account, its objectivity remains questionable.

Inevitably, my autobiography is not so much the story of my life as the story of my opinions about my life. And that includes opinions about the many people I encountered; there is a long index of persons. Numerous people are merely mentioned, but about others I say what I think -- or mostly. There is no point in writing a book like this if it isn't honest, reflecting the writer's beliefs, whatever the topic. And yet, while that rules out insincere mealymouthedness, there is a need to avoid brutal frankness, so as to attenuate the hurt words can inflict, not to mention the lawsuits they might engender. For me, the test was that I should be able to defend what I say to the person I discussed.

My opinions about all conceivable subjects are everywhere -- some stated briefly, others extensively; sometimes I pontificate. But these ubiquitous intrusions of narratives about other people and of talk on many themes -- religion, art, writing philosophy, job-hunting -- create the paradox that the chronicle of a life can be told chronologically only in broad outline. Many decisions must be made about how chronology should be sacrificed on the altar of intelligibility.

Although full of people and events, the book is nevertheless not about my life and times. The "times" are background and, on occasion, push their way up front, as in the account of my childhood in Hitler's Germany or when, in 1967, the campus of San Francisco State, where I was teaching, exploded into near chaos. To provide more broader contexts would have made the book even longer, but not necessarily better.

Writing this autobiography was a mixture of the pleasures of craftsmanship and the pleasure, rooted in masochism, of decision-making and of repeated revising of passages in the attempt to get them right. The mixture in the subsequent process of publishing was nowhere near so favorable. Subsidy publishers work for the writers who pay to have their manuscript turned into a book. I enjoyed designing the cover, selecting fonts, laying out the table of contents, etc. But since the person who was to manage my account quit just after I sent in my instructions, there were slips. The proofs that came were configured by computer programs wielded by operators who seemed never to have seen a book.

I made corrections, reintroduced my instructions and waited. Finally came another set of proofs -- identical to those of months earlier: not one change had been made. Indeed, everything I had sent in, a fat wad of paper plus floppies, had gotten lost. I sent copies to start all over again. More battles ensued between me and the publisher's computer programs, until finally a quite decent-looking book emerged -- by no means error-free -- a triumph of persistence over mechanical thinking, or of no thinking at all.

Almost five years had gone into the creation of "Mostly About Me." Now and then I think of more things that I might have included, but luckily it is too late for that. I am done, pleased with the result, and more than ready to turn to other things.

 

(Rudolph Weingartner lives in Squirrel Hill (rudywein@earthlink.net). "Mostly About Me" is available at several Pittsburgh bookstores.)