Autobiography

People's lives often strike me as more interesting than fiction. Lives are true, and fiction is more like dreams. Of course, any biography is selective, unlike my teenage diaries, which say "Woke up, went to school, mince for lunch, went home, listened to Dick Barton" and so on. Clive James' first volume of autobiography has a beautiful sentence, something like "Whatever looks like fiction is true, and whatever looks like truth is fiction" - a great way of giving him a free hand. Everybody should write their autobiography. Why? For their children and grandchildren, for posterity. With digital printing, you can print 10 copies or 20. With Ebooks, you don't even have to print any. You may also find it a kind of therapy. Have a look at "Who am I?" for a wonderfully brave attempt to record a life. Or "Everyman's Worst Nightmare: Cancer of the Penis" for an astonishingly genuine and human attempt to come to terms with a rare illness, and to warn others men about it.