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Writing an autobiography is an ungratifying occupation at best. It is a sort of journalism, in which the report, rather than being an eyewitness account of the event, is instead only a memory of the last time it was recalled. Borges illustrates the situation with the story of his father’s attempt to show him the untrustworthiness of memory; he lays a coin on the table and calls it the image itself. He puts a coin on top of the first one and calls that the first memory of the image. The next coin is the memory of that memory, and so on. Since this state of affairs is axiomatic, it follows that writing an autobiography is not the kind of work one would expect most writers to enjoy doing. And it is clear that telling what happened does not necessarily make a good story. In my tale, for instance, there are no dramatic victories because there was no struggle. I hung on and waited. It seems to me that this must be what most people do; the occasions when there is the possibility of doing more than that are becoming rare indeed.
-- Paul Bowles, Without Stopping
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