Autobiography III

You will search in vain for my Autobiographies I and II on this web site (excerpts are here and here). They are in book form, written in 1991 and 2004, though no bookstore stocks them. The purpose of this essay is to tell a little about those autobiographies and then to explain why I think a third one is necessary. Since this version will look fairly different from #1 and #2, I would also like to tell you what I am trying to do here.

Most people never write one autobiography. Almost all the rest who write one only write one. After all, you only live once, despite the title of the 1967 James Bond movie, and so what is the purpose of writing two autobiographies? And, if you write two, certainly that is enough. After all, writing more than two opens you to the near-fatal charge in America that you are an incurable narcissist.

But when you think about it for a bit, you begin to see the importance of writing more than one autobiography. First, life changes and you change, and you may want to make some record of these changes and what you think they mean. Then, your assessment of the meaning of the past changes over time. I "read" my education differently now that I did in 1980. In addition, you begin to realize that what you have written of an earlier period may be written from the perspective of an approach or ideology you no longer share. Finally, if you really are honest with yourself, you realize that the first autobiography is a failure; you write it, and then you realize how inadequate it is. Bill Clinton has the potential, for example, to write a much better second autobiography, principally because the first was hurriedly written and was written to get some cash flow coming to him to pay his gignormous legal bills.*

[*I used the word gignormous without doing a google search to discover if it appeared more or less frequently than ginormous. I was surprised that the latter has about 500X the attestations of the former. A friend of mine writes to me about ginormous spiders that seemingly prey on her, for example. But as I thought about the word for a moment, it seems as if gignormous makes more sense. After all, it is a portmanteau word, and the key to "portmanteuity," if I can coin another word, is the recognition of both of the contributing words to the new word. We have, for example, brunch, which has both "breakfast" and "lunch" easily seen in it. Or, chocoholic is made up of "chocolate" and "alcoholic." Part of the appeal of those words is in the easy recognition of the underlying words. But when we say ginormous, which rhymes with enormous, we are not really reminded of gigantic. However, gignormous, though a little harder to say than ginormous, calls both terms to mind. So, I hope to change our linguistic usage on this word in the future.]

One of the leading figures of the 18th century, Carolus Linnaeus, the father of modern animal and plant taxonomy, wrote five autobiographies, four in Swedist and the fifth in Latin. Linnaeus apparently could classify everything--except himself.

My Previous Attempts

After I wrote my first autobiography at age 39 (1991), I realized that I fell into the trap that nearly all "first autobiographers" fall into--I wrote the book not simply to explain but also, in a way, to justify my life. Even though I titled it 39 and Lost in America, I really didn't think I was that lost. I may have been in some confusion that motivated my thinking, and I may have wanted to explain loads of things from my (fairly brief) past, but in fact as I re-read that effort today I am struck by how much I want to convince the reader that I had made good choices in life. I claimed that my married life was wonderful (I was divorced in 2001; deep fissures in the marriage already were evident in 1991), that my course of study was a great thing, that my family of origin bequeathed to me positive virtues that helped me "make it," that the future was "opening up" to me even as I wrote, and that the "funk" I might have felt when writing some of the book was not going to last. It wasn't a book filled with self-critical passages, even though some of my best writing is in that book--my description of my son's birth, for example. I also used a lot of theological imagery in 39 and Lost, not only giving God the credit for lots of things in life, but making relatively long digressions to explain Augustine and Dante.

The title of my second autobiography (2004) was a sort of cutesy rejoinder to the implicit challenge of 39 and Lost. Entitled 52 and Strangely Found, the book contended that in 2004 I was emerging from a fairly deep and long-lasting funk, one that I really didn't recognize very fully in 39 and Lost, probably because I was in the midst of it and that I was now (in 2004) on a good path in life. Though I am only three years removed from that book, I tend to agree with that assessment. I have clambered out of a deep pit, and I am optimistically greeting each day. The tone of 52 and Strangely Found is different from 39 and Lost. While the former used sort of a declaratory style, with a generous listing of facts and interpretations, the latter explores irony, humor, and the sense that God (if God is there) sometimes speaks with such a muffled whisper that no one can hear the divine "voice." But I was "strangely" found because I felt that shortly after the culminatory blow of my distress (divorce after 24 years of marriage), I was able to develop new and helpful rhythms in life.

But only in the last year did it begin to dawn on me that two tellings of my life story weren't enough. Why? Well, read on..

A Third Autobiography

Rather than one connected work, divided into chapters and told chronologically, this third autobiography will be comprised of ruminative essays, with links on the left. Much of the material in these essays will be chronologically oriented, but I will feel free to explore one event in depth, or try to focus on emotions and relationships that I didn't explore in the first two books. Whereas the first two autobiographies almost uncritically assumed that my life consisted of the choices I made, the basic assumption in this book is that many of the things I did or that happened to me were affected by or even determined by choices I didn't or couldn't make. In that connection, then, this series of essays will look at feelings of vulnerability as a child, grief at ignorance, failure, anger, aimlessness, hopelessness, lust and, thankfully, the occasional successes or graces that have come into my life.

This autobiography is not meant to be a "woe is me," work at all, but it tries honestly to identify and assess the ways that I have been my worst enemy as well as my best friend, why I have been unable to "succeed" when I thought I would, and the various emotions that overwhelmed and still deeply affect me as I think about the mistakes of the past. I may reveal more about myself than others do about themselves, but as I get older I feel I have less and less to hide. My legacy, such as it is, is mixed plaid at best.

Begin with any essay on the left. You will begin to weave your own story as you read mine.

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