the.com/autobiography
the only book where the narrator is also the prime suspect and the unreliable witness.
means a person's account of their own life, written by themselves.
from Stitched from three Greek pieces: autos 'self,' bios 'life,' and graphein 'to write' — literally 'self-life-writing.' The compound is surprisingly young: 'biography' (life-writing of others) came first, and only in the early 19th century did writers bolt 'auto-' on the front to mark the special case where the subject holds the pen. Robert Southey is often credited with popularizing the English word around 1809, though the self-life-story itself is ancient — Augustine's Confessions had been doing the work for over a millennium before the label existed.
- first ever
- Augustine's Confessions, written around 400 AD
- term coined
- word appeared in English around 1797
- ghost problem
- many famous ones are written by someone else
- memory bug
- human recall reshapes events with each retelling
long walk to freedom — nelson mandela's 1994 autobiography covering his anti-apartheid struggle and presidency