When I was an English student ten years ago, I signed up to a module enigmatically described as “life writing”. Until then, the few autobiographical texts I had encountered on my degree course were ones tutors had thrown on to reading lists as a bit of a treat – like a teacher showing the film version of the GSCE set text – or ones I’d stumbled across myself. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, John Keats’s letters, the diaries of a serious Victorian teenager – they all held a voyeuristic, vicarious thrill, the sense of finally being in the room with buttoned-up, plum-voiced, long-dead figures and finding them both normal and strange, at times unintentionally comical. But after I’d submitted my choice, I was told the lecture series was cancelled due to a lack of interest: I was the only student to enrol.
This might suggest something about how life writing was valued academically – a decade ago, at least. Yet for many readers, the genre holds essential truths that distinguishes it from other literary forms. Virginia Woolf once declared that “of all literature (yes, I think this is more or less true) I love autobiography most. In fact I sometimes think only autobiography is literature – novels are what we peel off, and come at last to the core, which is only you or me.”
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