Article #1178

Don’t be fooled by the A-Z treatment – this thoroughgoing guide asks deep questions about the art of autobiography

“I’ve had a life and I’ve also had a life as a life writer”: Blake Morrison opens his tour d’horizon of arguably literature’s most expanding and expansive genre with a flash of his credentials and an implicit call to further inquiry. What constitutes a life, and what can it mean to write about it? Can you write about your own from inside it?

Before his bestselling and highly praised account of his father’s life and death, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, was published in 1993, Morrison had a life as a poet, a critic and a literary editor. And perhaps his interest in penetrating the mysteries of another’s interior world was already in evidence: a few years earlier, he had written The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, in which he had attempted to capture what newspaper reports had missed of serial killer Peter Sutcliffe (“So cops they lobbed im questions / Through breakfast, dinner, tea, / Till e said: ‘All right, you’ve cracked it. / Ripper, aye, it’s me.’”).