Icon autobiography

Autobiography is among the most important and valuable vehicles for exploring the human realm in all of its depth, complexity, and richness. Although there are numerous ways to define and conceptualize autobiography, for current purposes it may be considered the specific kind of text that results from the first-person interpretive reconstruction of either a life in its [Page 46]entirety or a significant portion of it, with the aim not merely of recounting “what happened when” but also of understanding, from the vantage point of the current time, the meaning and movement of the past.

Located whenever and wherever such interpretive reconstruction occurs—whether in the context of questionnaires, interviews, or those larger literary texts that may be created when an individual takes the time to explore his or her life in its full measure via writing—autobiography is perhaps the primary inroad to the elusive phenomenon of the self, at least as it ha