Where Have all the Autobiographies Gone?
The Italics are Mine
by Nina Berberova
(Knopf, 1992)
In my blog entry of March 5, I commented on reader expectations of memoirs in response to the dustup over the Margaret Jones/Margaret Seltzer/ Truth and Consequences scandal. Continuing my research into Nina Berberova for my Open Letters piece, today I read the first paragraph of Nina Berberova's autobiography, The Italics are Mine, and had one of those rare reading moments when an author's words reach out and grab your scattered, ill-formed thoughts on a subject, shake them round like you would a Magic 8-Ball, and there, in the window, the scattered becomes clearer. Here is that paragraph, a paragraph that publishers and lawyers alike should especially relish for the protection it provides them and the author from irate readers who declare that accounts of an author's life should be repositories of verifiable truths. And also it raises the interesting question: where have all the autobiographies gone? My American Heritage dictionary claims autobiography and memoirs are synonomous. Are they? In this paragraph Berberova claims a distinct difference between the genres. Time to search for another Magic 8-Ball ....
"I would like to warn the reader: this book is about myself, not about other people; an autobiography, not a set of memoirs, not a collection of portraits of famous (or not so famous) contemporaries, and not a series of vignettes. It is the story of my life, and in it I loosely follow the chronological order of events and uncover my life's meaning. I loved and love life and love the meaning of life almost as much. I will speak more about myself than about other people. My mind lives in the past as memory and in the present as my awareness of myself in time. There may be no future at all, or it may be brief and meaningless. This I have to face."