nd self-reflection and introspection (Berryman 3). The form of autobiography however goes back to antiquity. Biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints; an autobiography, however, may be based entirely on the writer s memory. Closely associated with autobiography is the form of memoir. A memoir is slightly different in character from an autobiography. While an autobiography typically focuses on the life and times of the writer, a memoir has a narrower, more intimate focus on his or her own memories, feelings and emotions. Memoirs have often been written by politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploits. Memoir comes from Latin word memoria meaning memory. A memoir is an evolution of the autobiography. An autobiography is a story written by oneself about one life. Most autobiographies are written from the first person singular perspective. This is fitting because autobiography is usually a story one tells about oneself. It would not naturally follow then that the writer would recount his or her past from a second or third person perspective. Jean Quigley confirms this point in her book The Grammar of Autobiography by saying that as soon as we are asked about ourselves, or are asked to tell our autobiography, we start to tell stories. We tell what happened, what we said, what we did (J. Quigley 6). The author, the narrator, and the protagonist must share a common identity for the work to be considered an autobiography (Anderson 1). This common identity could be similar, but is not identical. The self that the author constructs becomes a character within the story that may not be a completely factual representation of the author s actual past self (Quigley 6, Porter and Wolf 12). Roger Porter and H.R. Wolf state that Truth is a highly subjective matter, and no autobiographer can represent exactly what happened back then , any more than a historian can definitively describe the real truth of the past (R. Porter and HR 12). This is due in part to the fact that words are not adequate to fully express memories and emotions. Because autobiography is, as Anderson puts it, a public exposure of the private self , self-accounting and self-reflection are integral parts of the autobiography. The author wants to justify his or her past actions to the reader. Quigley says that a related but not identical narrator and protagonist are int...
