Life writing is an expansive genre that primarily deals with the purposeful recording of personal memories, experiences, opinions, and emotions for different ends. While what actually constitutes life writing has been up for debate throughout history, it has often been defined through the lens of the history of the autobiography genre as well as the concept of the self as it arises in writing. Framed by these two concepts, life writing as a genre has emerged to include many other subgenres including, but not limited to, the biography, memoir, diary, letter, testimony, and personal essay.
David McCooey highlights the interplay between literary and empirical writing. McCooey emphasizes the distinction between narrative as a literary tool and narrative as a lived experience.David McCooey (2017) The Limits of Life Writing, Life Writing, 14:3, 277-280, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14484528.2017.1338910?needAccess=true. By viewing life writing as a practice rather than a discipline, McCooey points out its perpetual preoccupations with several boundaries. These boundaries include the division between the self and others, the limits of remembering and forgetting, etc.
Life writing has functioned as a generic outlet for individuals to assess their personal diverse needs throughout history. In addition, David McCooey argues that the genre of life writing shares a similar quality to history, as both engage in an ongoing discussion that fosters an understanding of their overall significance within the broader scope of literary expression. It has served as a mode for the exploration of identity through critical self-reflection, allowing an individual to consider the internal, external, and temporal forces shaping their complex social identity. Likewise, the supergenre of life writing has permitted an individual to personally decide how they want to present themselves, whether that be to others within their social groups or simply to themselves as a way of imagining their ideal selves. Often accompanying the opportunity presented by life writing to fabricate a different self is the concept of resisting socio-cultural expectations, as the self that is fashioned may rebel against or reinforce societal norms that would otherwise be difficult to do in one's actual lived experience.
Life writing has further persisted in its use as an emotional space for negotiations of various feelings, inner desires, aspirations, and secrets. Individual pieces of life writing have attested to this flexibility and exploration possible within the genre, and such a flexibility has given life writing the role of preserving memory as well; these memories have ranged from keeping family traditions to recollecting one's past experiences as a way to diminish the potential onset or effects of dementia.
Life writing has been associated with bettering an individual's psychological and cognitive welfare significantly. For example, it has served to offer increased insight into an individual's difficult experiences, provide healthy coping management techniques, enable self-empathy with one's past self for consequential improvement of the present and future self, and propel discovery of one's life purpose since it has been altered within the confines of time. In the article called "The Limits of Life Writing," McCooey notes the extensive prevalence of life writing in contemporary society while highlighting the emergence of social media platforms, mobile networks, and electronic devices that have amplified the multi-platform nature of life writing. This broad examination shows how life writing and the real life autobiographies and biographies they are based on are connected in many ways. The area of life writing has gone through a lot of changes, such as focusing on ethics, taking a post-human point of view, and looking at emotions. As a result, these transformations did not occur in isolation but rather in continual conversation with other discourses, particularly in the legal and medical fields.These changes in life writing have gone beyond the usual limits of literary analysis, going into a rich study of the complicated limits that make this form what it is.
Definition Life writing is a broad generic category encompassing a myriad of diverse literary subgenres related to autobiographical storytelling. The qualities a piece of writing must possess in order to be classified under the umbrella term of "life writing" has been up for debate, as what constitutes life writing has been continually altered and redefined throughout history. Approaches to defining life writing have ranged from establishing loose criteria for its generic language and style – its form – to evaluating its content, topic, and context – its substance.
Despite the sizeable ambiguity revolving around the term, scholars have expressed a sustained general consensus about what life writing entails. Life writing has been determined to be generally nonfictive as well as closely associated with two themes: the genre of the autobiography as well as the relation of writing to the self. The autobiography has been perceived as the precursor to life writing, setting the foundation down for the first-person prose narrative inherently characteristic of the pieces falling within the genre. The terms "life writing" and "autobiography" are used interchangeably in many studies of life writing, despite the fact that other scholars champion slight differences existing between the two that have emerged to be more distinguishable with time. The level of connection existing between life writing and autobiography has been negotiated as well as contested. After all, when writing embraces an autobiographical essence, it emerges from the notion of our existence, grounding itself in the present moment.Marc Farrant (2021) Archival and Affective Displacements: The Ethics of Self-reflexivity, Shame, and Sacrifice in J.M. Coetzee’s Life-Writing, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 32:3, 173-191, This sense of one's experiences in the present moment conveys a quality to life itself, enabling its usefulness regardless of surreal and imaginative fiction.
Scholars who view the autobiography to be intimately connected to life writing have conveyed its respective influence on the comprehensive genre. The framework of the autobiography in itself has put forth many of the pieces that have been chosen for critical reflection and study in life writing. Some of those include the memoir, diary, personal journal, annotated almanac, prose narrative, testimony, and poem. The social contexts in which the autobiography has occurred has enhanced the vastness of life writing as a genre; it has touched particularly upon the political, religious, psychological, and feminist spheres. While the autobiography is substantially recognized and discussed within the study of life writing, genres that have been less acknowledged but still considered to be emblematic of life writing have also been identified. Such genres include letters, travel-inspired writing, historical records, and that of the biography.
Coupled with the autobiographical tendency apparent within life writing, life writing involves discerning one or more dimensions of the self. Individuals taking on the endeavor of life writing are at liberty to utilize the generic outlet for personal expression or examination of themselves. In both respects, the self becomes a governing force within life writing, as individuals deliberately engage in the exploration of their emotions, thoughts, intersectional identities, social roles, relationships, temporal position, and their place within their socio-cultural context.
Historical uses
Identity and self-reflection Amassing popularity in the early modern period, life writing has been utilized by individuals as a method of exploring the complex dimensions of their identity. In the act of life writing, individuals are encouraged to comprehend what specific facet of their identity most prominently shapes the whole of it, whether that be one affiliated with the romantic, spiritual, racial, gendered, socio-economic, or familial. Because life writing prompts an individual to evaluate themselves personally, it concurrently motivates them to understand themselves not only as isolated and solitary beings but also as a product of numerous external influences pertaining to society and culture. In this manner, life writing is regarded as an outlet for "self-collection," wherein an individual gathers information gradually about themselves by the two-fold means of internal introspection as well as contemplation of outward forces. Life writing consequently bridges the public and the private, creating a union of contexts that ultimately manifests itself within the writing of an individual. Life writing for the aim of further discovering an individual's identity becomes a meaning-making activity, one that entails making sense of the world and the experiences they endure within it.
Presentation of the self and form of resistance Individuals have employed life writing to fabricate a certain image of themselves in order to control how they appeal to others as well as to themselves. Through the subjectivity of life writing, individuals are imbued with the option to represent who they are by either attempting to objectively recount their experiences or by crafting a version of themselves they ideally imagine to be through purposeful or subconscious deliberation. This use of life writing has been historically represented in relation to gender, as cultural assumptions ingrained within the fabric of society have often hindered individuals from deviating from their assigned social roles and achieving their ideal selves. Commencing in first half of the 16th century, women utilized diaries, a genre of life writing, to craft their own personas. For example, Anne Askew through her autobiography The Examinations of Anne Askew attempted to convince herself of her religious nature and her involvement within her church. Katherine Austen in the 17th century portrayed herself as a widowed evangelist. Likewise, Anne Clifford in her personal diary depicted herself predominantly as a woman in possession of property rather than through the traditional social role of an "obedient wife." In order to stray away from societal expectations, Dionys Fitzherbert in her autobiographical writings in the 17th century refuses to acknowledge her own mental illness, denying its existence in order lessen the strength of the cultural association between femininity and hysteria. Through this personal control of narrative, life writing allows individuals to exercise their sense of authority in deciding what to reveal about themselves.