The Autobiographer's Handbook


Book Description

"... You're invited to a roundtable discussion with today's most successful memoirists"--P. [4] of cover.




The Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biography


Book Description

In a neo-liberal era concerned with discourses of responsible individualism and the ‘selfie’, there is an increased interest in personal lives and experiences. In contemporary life, the personal is understood to be political and these ideas cut across both the social sciences and humanities. This handbook is specifically concerned with auto/biography, which sits within the field of narrative, complementing biographical and life history research. Some of the contributors emphasise the place of narrative in the construction of auto/biography, whilst others disrupt the perceived boundaries between the individual and the social, the self and the other. The collection has nine sections: creativity and collaboration; families and relationships; epistolary lives; geography; madness; prison lives; professional lives; ‘race’; and social justice and disability. They illustrate the inter- and multi-disciplinary nature of auto/biography as a field. Each section features an introduction from a section editor, many of whom are established researchers and/or members of the British Sociological Association (BSA) Auto/Biography study group. The handbook provides the reader with cutting-edge research from authors at different stages in their careers, and will appeal to those with an interest in auto/biography, auto-ethnography, epistolary traditions, lived experiences, narrative analysis, the arts, education, politics, philosophy, history, personal life, reflexivity, research in practice and the sociology of the everyday. Chapter 1: A Case for Auto/Biography; Julie Parsons and Anne Chappell. Section One: Creativity and Collaboration; edited by Gayle Letherby. Chapter 2: The Times are a Changing: Culture(s) of Medicine; Theresa Compton. Chapter 3: Seventeen Minutes and Thirty-One Seconds: An Auto/Biographical Account of Collaboratively Witnessing and Representing an Untold Life Story; Kitrina Douglas and David Carless. Chapter 4: Reflections on a Collaborative, Creative 'Working' Relationship; Deborah Davidson and Gayle Letherby. Section Two: Families and Relationships: Auto/Biography and Family, A Natural Affinity?; edited by David Morgan. Chapter 5: Life Story and Narrative Approaches in the Study of Family Lives; Julia Brannen. Chapter 6: The Research Methods for Discovering Housing Inequalities in Socio-Biographical Studies; Elizaveta Polukhina. Chapter 7: Auto/Biographical Research and The Family; Aidan Seery and Karin Bacon. Section Three: Epistolary Lives: Fragments, Sensibility, Assemblages in Auto/Biographical Research; edited by Maria Tamboukou. Chapter 8: Letter-Writing and the Actual Course of Things: Doing the Business, Helping the World Go Round; Liz Stanley. Chapter 9: The Unforeseeable Narrative: Epistolary Lives in Nineteenth Century Iceland; Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir. Chapter 10: Auto/Pathographies In Situ: 'Dying of Melancholy' in Nineteenth Century Greece; Dimitra Vassiliadou. Section Four: Geography Matters: Spatiality and Auto/Biography; edited by John Barker and Emma Wainwright. Chapter 11: "Trying to Keep Up": Intersections of Identity, Space, Time and Rhythm in Women Student Carer Auto/Biographical Accounts; Fin Cullen, John Barker and Pam Alldred. Chapter 12: Spatiality and Auto/Biographical Narratives of Encounter in Social Housing; Emma Wainwright, Elodie Marandet and Ellen McHugh. Chapter 13: “I Thought... I Saw... I Heard...”: The Ethical and Moral Tensions of Auto/Biographically Opportunistic Research in Public Spaces; Tracy Ann Hayes. Section Five: Madness, Dys-order and Autist/Biography: Auto/Biographical Challenges to Psychiatric Dominance; edited by Kay Inckle. Chapter 14: Autist/Biography; Alyssa Hillary. Chapter 15: Reaching Beyond Auto? A Polyvocal Representation of Recovery From “Eating Dys-order”; Bríd O’Farrell. Chapter 16: [R]evolving Towards Mad: Spinning Away from the Psy/Spy-Complex Through Auto/Biography; Phil Smith. Section Six: Prison Lives; edited by Dennis Smith. Chapter 17: Nelson Mandela: Courage and Conviction – The Making of a Leader; Dennis Smith. Chapter 18: The “Other” Prison of Antonio Gramsci and Giulia Schucht; Jeni Nicholson. Chapter 19: Bobby Sands: Prison and the Formation of a Leader; Denis O’Hearn. - Section Seven: Professional Lives; edited by Jenny Byrne. Chapter 20: Academic Lives in a Period of Transition in Higher Education: Bildung in Educational Auto/Biography; Irene Selway, Jenny Byrne and Anne Chappell. Chapter 21: Narratives of Early Career Teachers in a Changing Professional Landscape; Glenn Stone. Chapter 22: What Does it Mean to be a Young Professional Graduate Working in the Private Sector?; Jenny Byrne. Section Eight: 'Race' and Cultural Difference; edited by Geraldine Brown. Chapter 23: Now You See Me, Now You Don’t! Making Sense of the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Experience of UK Higher Education: One Person’s Story; Gurnam Singh. Chapter 24: Raging Against the Dying of the Light; Paul Grant. Chapter 25: Black Young Men: Problematisation, Humanisation and Effective Engagement; Carver Anderson. Section Nine: Social Justice and Disability: Voices From the Inside; by Chrissie Rogers. Chapter 26: Missing Data and Socio-Political Death: The Sociological Imagination Beyond the Crime; Chrissie Roger. Chapter 27: Co-Constructed Auto/Biographies in Dwarfism Mothering Research: Imagining Opportunities for Social Justice; Kelly-Mae Saville. Chapter 28: An Auto/Biographical Account of Managing Autism and a Hybrid Identity: 'Covering' for Eight Days Straight; Amy Simmons.




Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction


Book Description

Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importance. By conceiving autobiography in a wide sense that includes memoirs, diaries, self-portraits and autofiction as well as media transformations of the genre, this three-volume handbook offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical approaches, systematic aspects, and historical developments in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. While autobiography is usually considered to be a European tradition, special emphasis is placed on the modes of self-representation in non-Western cultures and on inter- and transcultural perspectives of the genre. The individual contributions are closely interconnected by a system of cross-references. The handbook addresses scholars of cultural and literary studies, students as well as non-academic readers.




The Autobiography Box


Book Description

Addressing the growing popularity of the memoir, this book presents writing tips in a visually dynamic, hands-on portable kit. Sixty appealing cards filled with quotes, questions, directions, and exercises provide the practice, while the book provides inspiring quotes from great writers and journal spaces for personal entries. Shrink-wrapped.




So Here It Is


Book Description

'No Slade = No Oasis. It's as devastating and as simple as that' Noel Gallagher With six consecutive number one singles and the smash hit ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, Slade were unstoppable. Now, the man whose outlandish costumes and unmistakable hairstyle made Slade one of the definitive acts of the Glam Rock era tells his story. But there’s more to Dave’s life than rock 'n' roll and good times. So Here It Is also covers the band’s painful break-up, Dave’s subsequent battle with depression, and his recovery from the stroke that threatened to cut short his performing career. If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to be a working-class lad from the Midlands suddenly confronted by unimaginable fame, So Here It Is is the definitive account, told with heart and humour and filled with never-before-seen photos.




Fathers and Sons


Book Description

If there is a literary gene, then the Waugh family most certainly has it—and it clearly seems to be passed down from father to son. The first of the literary Waughs was Arthur, who, when he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry at Oxford in 1888, broke with the family tradition of medicine. He went on to become a distinguished publisher and an immensely influential book columnist. He fathered two sons, Alec and Evelyn, both of whom were to become novelists of note (and whom Arthur, somewhat uneasily, would himself publish); both of whom were to rebel in their own ways against his bedrock Victorianism; and one of whom, Evelyn, was to write a series of immortal novels that will be prized as long as elegance and lethal wit are admired. Evelyn begat, among seven others, Auberon Waugh, who would carry on in the family tradition of literary skill and eccentricity, becoming one of England’s most incorrigibly cantankerous and provocative newspaper columnists, loved and loathed in equal measure. And Auberon begat Alexander, yet another writer in the family, to whom it has fallen to tell this extraordinary tale of four generations of scribbling male Waughs. The result of his labors is Fathers and Sons, one of the most unusual works of biographical memoir ever written. In this remarkable history of father-son relationships in his family, Alexander Waugh exposes the fraught dynamics of love and strife that has produced a succession of successful authors. Based on the recollections of his father and on a mine of hitherto unseen documents relating to his grandfather, Evelyn, the book skillfully traces the threads that have linked father to son across a century of war, conflict, turmoil and change. It is at once very, very funny, fearlessly candid and exceptionally moving—a supremely entertaining book that will speak to all fathers and sons, as well as the women who love them.




The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture


Book Description

This Palgrave Handbook examines the ways in which researchers and practitioners theorise, analyse, produce and make use of testimony. It explores the full range of testimony in the public sphere, including perpetrator testimony, testimony presented through social media and virtual reality. A growing body of research shows how complex and multi-layered testimony can be, how much this complexity adds to our understanding of our past, and how creators and users of testimony have their own complex purposes. These advances indicate that many of our existing assumptions about testimony and models for working with it need to be revisited. The purpose of this Palgrave Handbook is to do just that by bringing together a wide range of disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, and practice-based perspectives.




The Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biography


Book Description

In a neo-liberal era concerned with discourses of responsible individualism and the ‘selfie’, there is an increased interest in personal lives and experiences. In contemporary life, the personal is understood to be political and these ideas cut across both the social sciences and humanities. This handbook is specifically concerned with auto/biography, which sits within the field of narrative, complementing biographical and life history research. Some of the contributors emphasise the place of narrative in the construction of auto/biography, whilst others disrupt the perceived boundaries between the individual and the social, the self and the other. The collection has nine sections: creativity and collaboration; families and relationships; epistolary lives; geography; madness; prison lives; professional lives; ‘race’; and social justice and disability. They illustrate the inter- and multi-disciplinary nature of auto/biography as a field. Each section features an introduction from a section editor, many of whom are established researchers and/or members of the British Sociological Association (BSA) Auto/Biography study group. The handbook provides the reader with cutting-edge research from authors at different stages in their careers, and will appeal to those with an interest in auto/biography, auto-ethnography, epistolary traditions, lived experiences, narrative analysis, the arts, education, politics, philosophy, history, personal life, reflexivity, research in practice and the sociology of the everyday. Chapter 1: A Case for Auto/Biography; Julie Parsons and Anne Chappell. Section One: Creativity and Collaboration; edited by Gayle Letherby. Chapter 2: The Times are a Changing: Culture(s) of Medicine; Theresa Compton. Chapter 3: Seventeen Minutes and Thirty-One Seconds: An Auto/Biographical Account of Collaboratively Witnessing and Representing an Untold Life Story; Kitrina Douglas and David Carless. Chapter 4: Reflections on a Collaborative, Creative 'Working' Relationship; Deborah Davidson and Gayle Letherby. Section Two: Families and Relationships: Auto/Biography and Family, A Natural Affinity?; edited by David Morgan. Chapter 5: Life Story and Narrative Approaches in the Study of Family Lives; Julia Brannen. Chapter 6: The Research Methods for Discovering Housing Inequalities in Socio-Biographical Studies; Elizaveta Polukhina. Chapter 7: Auto/Biographical Research and The Family; Aidan Seery and Karin Bacon. Section Three: Epistolary Lives: Fragments, Sensibility, Assemblages in Auto/Biographical Research; edited by Maria Tamboukou. Chapter 8: Letter-Writing and the Actual Course of Things: Doing the Business, Helping the World Go Round; Liz Stanley. Chapter 9: The Unforeseeable Narrative: Epistolary Lives in Nineteenth Century Iceland; Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir. Chapter 10: Auto/Pathographies In Situ: 'Dying of Melancholy' in Nineteenth Century Greece; Dimitra Vassiliadou. Section Four: Geography Matters: Spatiality and Auto/Biography; edited by John Barker and Emma Wainwright. Chapter 11: "Trying to Keep Up": Intersections of Identity, Space, Time and Rhythm in Women Student Carer Auto/Biographical Accounts; Fin Cullen, John Barker and Pam Alldred. Chapter 12: Spatiality and Auto/Biographical Narratives of Encounter in Social Housing; Emma Wainwright, Elodie Marandet and Ellen McHugh. Chapter 13: “I Thought... I Saw... I Heard...”: The Ethical and Moral Tensions of Auto/Biographically Opportunistic Research in Public Spaces; Tracy Ann Hayes. Section Five: Madness, Dys-order and Autist/Biography: Auto/Biographical Challenges to Psychiatric Dominance; edited by Kay Inckle. Chapter 14: Autist/Biography; Alyssa Hillary. Chapter 15: Reaching Beyond Auto? A Polyvocal Representation of Recovery From “Eating Dys-order”; Bríd O’Farrell. Chapter 16: [R]evolving Towards Mad: Spinning Away from the Psy/Spy-Complex Through Auto/Biography; Phil Smith. Section Six: Prison Lives; edited by Dennis Smith. Chapter 17: Nelson Mandela: Courage and Conviction – The Making of a Leader; Dennis Smith. Chapter 18: The “Other” Prison of Antonio Gramsci and Giulia Schucht; Jeni Nicholson. Chapter 19: Bobby Sands: Prison and the Formation of a Leader; Denis O’Hearn. - Section Seven: Professional Lives; edited by Jenny Byrne. Chapter 20: Academic Lives in a Period of Transition in Higher Education: Bildung in Educational Auto/Biography; Irene Selway, Jenny Byrne and Anne Chappell. Chapter 21: Narratives of Early Career Teachers in a Changing Professional Landscape; Glenn Stone. Chapter 22: What Does it Mean to be a Young Professional Graduate Working in the Private Sector?; Jenny Byrne. Section Eight: 'Race' and Cultural Difference; edited by Geraldine Brown. Chapter 23: Now You See Me, Now You Don’t! Making Sense of the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Experience of UK Higher Education: One Person’s Story; Gurnam Singh. Chapter 24: Raging Against the Dying of the Light; Paul Grant. Chapter 25: Black Young Men: Problematisation, Humanisation and Effective Engagement; Carver Anderson. Section Nine: Social Justice and Disability: Voices From the Inside; by Chrissie Rogers. Chapter 26: Missing Data and Socio-Political Death: The Sociological Imagination Beyond the Crime; Chrissie Roger. Chapter 27: Co-Constructed Auto/Biographies in Dwarfism Mothering Research: Imagining Opportunities for Social Justice; Kelly-Mae Saville. Chapter 28: An Auto/Biographical Account of Managing Autism and a Hybrid Identity: 'Covering' for Eight Days Straight; Amy Simmons.




The Beautiful Ones


Book Description

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A Times, Sunday Times and Telegraph Book of the Year ______________________________________________ 'A triumph ... a masterclass in the bottling of its subject's seductive essence. His presence in this book is so strong that it's hard to believe he has really left the building' MOJO 'Handsomely presented, visually sumptuous' THE TIMES ______________________________________________ From Prince himself comes the brilliant coming-of-age-and-into-superstardom story of one of the greatest artists of all time-featuring never-before-seen photos, original scrapbooks and lyric sheets, and the exquisite memoir he began writing before his tragic death. Prince was a musical genius, one of the most talented, beloved, accomplished, popular, and acclaimed musicians in pop history. But he wasn't only a musician-he was also a startlingly original visionary with an imagination deep enough to whip up whole worlds, from the sexy, gritty funk paradise of his early records to the mythical landscape of Purple Rain to the psychedelia of Paisley Park. But his greatest creative act was turning Prince Rogers Nelson, born in Minnesota, into Prince, the greatest pop star of his era. The Beautiful Ones is the story of how Prince became Prince-a first-person account of a kid absorbing the world around him and then creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and fame that would come to define him. The book is told in four parts. The first is composed of the memoir he was writing before his tragic death, pages that brings us into Prince's childhood world through his own lyrical prose. The second part takes us into Prince's early years as a musician, before his first album released, through a scrapbook of Prince's writing and photos. The third section shows us Prince's evolution through candid images that take us up to the cusp of his greatest achievement, which we see in the book's fourth section: his original handwritten treatment for Purple Rain-the final stage in Prince's self-creation, as he retells the autobiography we've seen in the first three parts as a heroic journey. The book is framed by editor Dan Piepenbring's riveting and moving introduction about his short but profound collaboration with Prince in his final days-a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he'd so carefully cultivated-and annotations that provide context to each of the book's images. This work is not just a tribute to Prince, but an original and energizing literary work, full of Prince's ideas and vision, his voice and image, his undying gift to the world. ______________________________________________ 'Prince's voice comes through loud and clear; his personality, joie de vivre and single-mindedness jumping off the page throughout.' CLASSIC POP MAGAZINE 'The Beautiful Ones is for everyone. It's not a read, but an experience, an immersion inside the mind of a musical genius. You are steeped in Prince's images, his words, his essence... The book can be a starting point for a Prince fascination, or a continuation of long-standing admiration. Either way, it will deepen the connection of any reader with the musical icon." USA TODAY 'An affirmation of Prince's Blackness and humanity... Prince writes about his childhood with clarity and poetic flair, effortlessly combining humorous anecdotes with deep self-reflection and musical analysis... Prince is one of us - he just worked to manifest dreams that took him from the North Side of Minneapolis to the Super Bowl.' HUFFPOST 'A compelling curiosity that finds its author orbiting around a few touchingly intimate encounters with his sphinx-like subject ... with passages, lyric sheets and photographs from the Purple One himself' TELEGRAPH, Books of the Year 'Both a pleasure and a surprise ... Prince took the project very seriously, and it shows in the work he delivered. ... It shines an intimate and revealing light on the least-known period of his life' VARIETY 'The Beautiful Ones is a book in pieces, fragments of the ground-breaking autobiography Prince had planned. Pieced together after his death in 2016, it collects his handwritten childhood memoires, superb personal photographs and his chosen co-writer Dan Piepenbring's vivid account of their brief collaboration. Yet remarkably despite the central absence, it still catches something of Prince between the gaps - a trace of perfume, a glance to camera, a first kiss' SUNDAY TIMES, Book of the Year 'This is a beautiful book and a must-have for Prince completists' DAILY EXPRESS 'A ghostly memoir of a pop legend' THE i




How to Write an Autobiography


Book Description

Whether it's fiction or non-fiction, a story is a story, and good story-telling can go a long way towards piquing the attention of your audience. The conundrum most people encounter when deciding to write their autobiography or memoir is that they know they have a great story to tell, but they're not sure how to tell it. If this is how you feel, then you're certainly not alone. The good news is that, while a compelling life story is something you either have or don't have, the technical know-how to put your story into words is something that you can learn. This book is designed specifically for individuals who wish to share their autobiography with the world but need some step-by-step assistance for getting it done. I'm going to provide you with specific guidance on how to structure your story, a sound overview of what's required in the construction of a memoir, and also valuable advice about the finer points of autobiography creation. Let's get started!