Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography

All autobiographers are unreliable narrators. Yet what a writer chooses to misrepresent is as telling — perhaps even more so — as what really happened. Timothy Adams believes that autobiography is an attempt to reconcile one’s life with one’s self, and he argues in this book that autobiography should not be taken as historically accurate but as metaphorically authentic.

Adams focuses on five modern American writers whose autobiographies are particularly complex because of apparent lies that ...