When you write about your life, you have to connect the particular people, places, and events that shaped you to strangers who will view those particulars through the lens of their experiences. For that, there’s no guidebook. To you, they are abstractions: you don’t know them; they don’t know you. All you have in common is your humanity.
You’re not writing to make them care about you. They care about themselves—and about your story only to the extent that it illuminates theirs: their lives, struggles, and fears.
So if I ask, “How did an Irish-Italian Catholic kid from the Bronx break with the world of Marvel comics in the 1960s, discover philosophy, come under the influence of a notable communist, and a few years later follow an obscure dispensationalist Bible teacher and then a leading anarcho-capitalist theoretician—all while studying guitar theory under a jazz giant, working as Folk City’s doorman and later for a world-class architect?,” the likely response is, “Who cares?” or “Sounds like a very confused kid!”
But if the narrator frames his story as a key to unlocking history that they’re curious about—or, even better, lived through—and hints at answers to questions they’ve long asked themselves, then he won’t just attract an audience. He’ll hold them. And if he delivers, they won’t just stay. They’ll bring others to the fire.
[To be continued]
Posts with autobiographical content:
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- Herbert Aptheker: Apothecary for a Red Teenager
- Bernard Lonergan’s Insight: On Becoming an Intellectually Fulfilled Theist
- Sidney Hook: A Halfway House for a Recovering Stalinist
- When George Novack Was an Entranced Disciple of Whitehead
- Milestones and Memory’s Millstones
- What a Difference a Pogrom Makes: Thoughts on the Left’s Embrace of Barbarism
- Is Green the New Red? Why on Earth Does Earth Day Fall on Lenin’s Birthday?