"March 1999"--Title page verso

Includes bibliographical references (pages 185-191) and index.

In recent years, the memoir has been celebrated as our liveliest literary genre and condemned as the confessional mode of a self-obsessed society. Now Jill Ker Conway, herself the author of two highly praised volumes of autobiography, turns her attention to some of the most notable examples of the form since Saint Augustine wrote his Confessions sixteen centuries ago. From the luminous spirituality of twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen to the secular egotism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from the ambitious pragmatism of industrialist Henry Ford to the self-effacing style of former Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, Conway reveals the distinct archetypal patterns that women and men have turned to when telling their life stories. In sensitive analysis of an extraordinary range of narratives, she shows how memoirs satisfy our deep yearning to enter imaginatively into other lives. -- Back cover.

Discusses why we read autobiographies, the cultural assumptions that go into writing about ourselves, the difference between autobiographies of men and women, and much more.

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