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If forced to capture in succinct form the difference between the writing of a biography and an autobiography, we might naturally appeal to the distinctive role of memory played in the latter. While it is true that a biography or memoir of a person we know, or knew, does depend on memory (as does Norman Malcolm's memoir of Wittgenstein,¹ for example), it is of course common to write biographically of a subject we did not know personally (as in Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein²). In the autobiographical case, unlike that of a biographer, however, it seems impossible to escape this fact: even where the autobiographer relies upon what we will in this context call "externals' — for example, letters, documents, photographs, diaries, calendars, journals, and countless other bits of data — that data will have a memory-triggering function. That is to say, the autobiographer will use all the assembled materials not, as does the non-personally acquainted biographer, to assemble a mosaic of what the subject must have done and might have experienced. Rather, the autobiographer will use those materials to stimulate, or revivify, memories of the events, actions, and experiences indicated by each bit of assembled data.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230598621_5

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