It was irritating not because their lives didn't fit Gabler's thesis, but because the more I read of his book, the more I realized, that mine does. At college, heavily under the influence of the Blues Brothers movie, I used to do homework late at night wearing dark glasses. It was dark, I was wearing sunglasses. Just think how cool you have to be to wear dark glasses when you're by yourself. My own imaginary audience was what I called my Phantom Biographer.
Age brings humility.
The prospect of anyone's wanting to write my biography seems pretty remote. Not just life, but a saga requiring certain events, particular achievements, at dramatically important intervals, ideally with the appropriate dialogue and costume. This is miles away from the Socratic dictum of the examined life being the one worth living. Headphones on, I would gaze moodily, cinematically, out of train windows. I wore a beret and wouldn't have been caught dead with a backpack, however useful it might have been.