As a fiction lover, I rarely deviate from my preferences to consider non-fiction or creative non-fiction options, like autobiographies or biographies, even though they have had prominent places in literature. Some like, The Diary of Young Girl by Anne Frank and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings have even been credited as the best autobiographies of all time. Similarly, the autobiographies of famous personalities, including political figures such as Malcom X, Nelson Mandela, Ghandi and more recently Barack Obama are seen as important insights into the political issues of our time. Other autobiographies, such as that of celebrities like Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Mindy Calling or Carrie Fisher are highly popular as cultural icons.
And yet, regardless of this list of autobiographies I have supplied, the genre has some of the worst sale statistics in the publishing industry. Rather it appears that the autobiographies that perform the best are very rarely the ones from famous personalities, but in fact, the stories retold by “ordinary” men and women. Those whose lives have not been in the spotlight but have experienced hardship or success and recount them in ways that provides and intimate look at their emotions.
Published June 2016, Hisham Matar’s Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography, The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between commanded my attention like very few books have. Writing about his experiences as a Libyan who spent much of childhood away from his home country due to Colonel Qaddafi’s tyrannical reign, The Return is a beautiful recasting of the notion of home in war-torn countries. While the details of the horrors endure by those who opposed Qaddafi’s regime and the sorrow their families had to face are harrowing, Matar’s prose is consistently enchanting. Those details are simultaneously central and peripheral to the narrative about family and identity. The difficulty of connecting with one’s roots after having lived abroad for so long was one that I deeply related to as so many do in a globalising world.
After finishing The Return, my attitude towards autobiographies has forever changed. Part of the reason Matar’s autobiography, while distressing and most definitely outside of ordinary experience (whatever that might entail), was so commanding to me was largely due to the realness of it. Though his story could have been adapted into a fiction (very easily by Matar himself as he is a fiction author as well), by staying true to his own experiences, the vulnerability he expresses throughout his narrative deepens the sense of empathy and simultaneously makes the reader more aware of the reality of the world.
Right after reading the novel, I spent hours researching Libya, it’s political history and the Libayan government and war, that then led me down the Google rabbit hole of researching the history of many Northern African countries. This is something that has never happened to me while reading fiction, even when said fiction takes place in real towns, in real countries. There is something about the reality of the experience which further draws your interest.
However, this brings up the interesting question of what is considered “real”. In one of the biggest scandals in publishing history, Fragments, the memoir of Binjamin Wilkomirski recounting surviving alone as a Jewish child in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek was proved be a complete fabrication from start to finish. Where it was once hailed as “one of the great works about the Holocuaust” by Anne Karpf it was soon discovered that though Wilkomirski believed every word of his story to be uncontestably true, it was in fact quite the opposite. However, does that dampen the impact of his so-called “memoir”? For many, it did. Solely because it never really happened.
Where the emotions and the experiences may have been drawn from truthful accounts, when put together into the completed work as Fragments it become nothing more than a fiction, and that makes a difference.
There are many adages regarding the truth in fiction, from “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth,” to “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” But when it comes to reading a true account of someone’s life, not riddled with exaggerations or fictional liberties, simply the truth, the good and the bad, it has the ability to connect deeply with the reader in a way that has a lasting impact.
It, like history, asks us to remember, appreciate and learn from the past. But unlike history, it becomes deeply personal in a way that makes us all accountable for our actions. It is this that is the greatest strength of autobiographies, and while it may also be the very reason so many people avoid the genre, it may also be the most vital tool we have for growth as a population. Though I tend to avoid giving any one genre that much power or influence I do think that I will be picking up more autobiographies in the near future.
~ S ~
