Do you read autobiographies?

Ophelia · Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2008 8:05 am Post subject: Do you read autobiographies?

I don't read many autobiographies, but sometimes a bestseller can be a good surprise: I read Jane Fonda's My Life so Far, I'm not usually a fan of Hollywood stars' personal lives but I found I learnt quite a lot from Fonda and the book was simply but well written.

I found that many things were interesting: her childhood, her relationship with her father, her political activism.

In contrast, brother Peter Fonda's autobiography is a disappointment. What he writes about his childhood kept me reading, but really after that it seemed to be all about his love life and he never seemed to grow much past adolescence.

I kept reading until the part about Easy Rider and here I learnt only one thing about how the film was made, and this paragraph is so striking that it's almost worth the money spent on the book. If anyone il interested in the making of Easy Rider I can tell them.

irishrosem · Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2008 9:38 am Post subject:

EDIT

Oops Chris. I just noticed this thread should probably be transferred to Additional Non-Fiction, if that's possible. Though, I know some people make the argument that autobiographies are more fictitious than not.

Ophelia, I don't really tend to read autobiographies. I enjoyed Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. And I've enjoyed some memoirs along the way. But, for the most part, I prefer reading biographies. And my favorite of those, so far, is probably Jeffrey Meyers's Modigliani, A Life. It's about Amedeo Modigliani, the Italian painter a sculptor. Meyers has also written a biography on Conrad that I keep meaning to look up.


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