GENRE WALK

AUTOBIO

GRAPHY

& MEMOIR

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

• AUTO = SELF• BIO = LIFE STORY• GRAPHY = TO WRITE

• A writer’s account of his or her own life.

• Focus is on author’s WHOLE life and the development of his or her personality.

EXAMPLES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

MEMOIRS

• Type of autobiography, many times focused on a time or important event in the writer’s life.

• Lou Willet Stanek, author of "Writing Your Life"

"If you were to write an autobiography, you would have to spend a lot of time at the courthouse, looking up the date your great-grandfather was born, what year your father bought the house on Elm Street. The research for a memoir can be done in an easy chair. Close your eyes and try to recapture the moment you bought your first car, learned you were pregnant, met the President or wobble down the street on a two-wheeler."

EXAMPLES OF MEMOIR

• Bad Boy

• Walter Dean Myers

Into a memoir that is gripping, funny, heartbreaking, and unforgettable, Walter Dean Myers richly weaves the details of his Harlem childhood in the 1940s and 1950s: a loving home life with his adopted parents, Bible school, street games, and the vitality of his neighborhood. Although Walter spent much of his time either getting into trouble or on the basketball court, secretly he was a voracious reader and an aspiring writer. But as his prospects for a successful future diminished, the values he had been taught at home, in school, and in his community seemed worthless, and he turned to the streets and his books for comfort.

EXAMPLES OF MEMOIR

Samantha Abeel tells her own story of living with and overcoming dyscalculia. She describes in painstaking detail how her life was affected by her learning disability before and after she was diagnosed, and the way her peers, her family, and her teachers treated her. In seventh grade, Samantha suffered anxiety attacks as she struggled to keep up in her classes, to remember two locker combinations, and to deal with new teachers. It was not until eighth grade, her “thirteenth winter,” that the underlying cause of her academic challenges was discovered.

My Thirteenth Winter

Samantha Abeel