Biography
"I was recently reading the biography of my great great grandma..."
I was listening to one of the videos I keep in my watch later pile as this sentence hit me. As if I suddenly realized that normal people can write their own biography, and equally normal people can read them. Huh?
I mean, I've been writing journals, diaries, whatever you want to call them, for years. But you usually don't call them "biographies", do you? That sounds too important, something only famous people can do. Or they hire a ghost writer to do it, whatever.
What's the difference between a diary and a biography? The second implies some kind of editing, a structure, when I think of a biography I picture a book. A diary could be anything. It could be a notebook, or even ten, or it could be a stack of pictures, drawn or photographs. It could be a neatly kept collections of sticky notes. Can't a diary be just something that tells a story about yourself? And if so, who are you telling that story to? Do you write diaries just for the sake of writing, or do you read them again? How far into the future? Do you want someone else to read them, or you're repulsed by the mere idea? What about blogs? Are they more similar to a biography, since they're often more curated and public than a personal diary, or are they still a sort of one? How much of what you write, from shopping lists to research papers, has been written so that someone else could read it, and how much of it has been written because you just wanted it to exist outside of your head?
If my great great nephew came across my diaries and read them when I was long gone, curious about the life I led but still firmly detached from someone they never met, I'd be kind of flattered.
But I'd also be kind of mad. Mind your own business!