What's your story : Autobiography and memoirs

Q. What's the difference between autobiography and memoirs

A. An autobiography is a biography written by its subject, often to explain as well as to inform. For example, John Henry Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua (Defence of His Life; 1864) is a 'confessional' autobiography in the tradition begun by St Augustine's in his Confessions (4th-5th century AD), and is a response to a personal attack. Some autobiographies come near to being works of fiction and many works of fiction have autobiographical aspects.

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Memoirs, on the other hand, are a written record of people and events as experienced by the author. As such, it is a form of autobiography that gives particular attention to matters of contemporary interest not necessarily closely affecting the author's inner life. It is not a formal personal history, but an assembly of memories.

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So, while the two do overlap, the differences could be encapsulated as follows: an autobiography tends to be a chronological narrative, concerned with historical setting and action, whereas memoirs tend to have a more personal, impressionistic tone.

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Q. Any examples of 'autobiography' as a technique in fiction

A. Novels written in the first person to suggest that they are autobiographical are too numerous to count. Distinguished early examples are Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), but nearly every fiction author has done it. Sometimes, as a double bluff, the 'work of fiction' really is autobiography disguised as a novel, such as The End of the Affair by Graham Greene.

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Q. Any famous memoirs

A. Memoirs from the ancient world include Xenophon's Anabasis and Julius Caesar's Commentaries. In modern literature, the French seem to excel at the discipline, but notable examples of British writers of memoirs range from the 17th-century Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson through Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Peter Wright's Spycatcher (1987).

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The memoir form has also been a device for fiction, especially in the early novel. John Cleland's pornographic Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-9) and Henry Mackenzie's sentimental novel The Man of Feeling (1771) are two examples of this.

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Q. Are memoirs and autobiographies always written by famous individuals

A. There was a time when memoirs and autobiographies by non-celebrities sold well enough. For example, thousands of accounts of wartime experiences by ordinary soldiers and civilians - especially people who had survived exceptionally harrowing experiences, such as survivors of the Nazi death camps - were published up to the 1980s. However, public taste seems increasingly drawn to the lives of the already famous or newsworthy - which is not to say that such things didn't always exist, only that the market for less celebrity-oriented biographical material appears to have largely dried up.

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By Simon Smith