Whatever qualities of character I possess would become anecdotes. My verbal meanderings would certainly become witty quips and snappy repartee. My memory of self is full of distortion. Grotesque embarrassments are easily forgotten and omitted. The plots of the past are dulled or sharpened by the play of the pen, the stroke of the keyboard.
Most autobiography is intended for the booksellers shelves.
The fiction becomes stranger than the truth. On the other hand, biography, the writing of a life by another, benefits from having a subject whose life has significance. The gift the giftie gie us is not a thing I would be delighted to discover beside my birthday cake. In January of 1944, Fortune magazine published an article entitled The Lord of Creation by Susanne K. Langer. Therein lies the great importance of symbolism for human life, its power to make this life so different from any other animal biography that generations of men, have found it incredible to suppose that they were of purely zoological origin.