Does Authenticity Rely on the Relatability of One's Life?

Chapter Six: "Autobiography and Authenticity"

"Even if it is a claim of the genre that the theme of the narrative should be the lived life of the narrator, that it should be autobiographically rooted, this claim alone is no guarantee of authenticity. We observe a distinct ambivalence inherent in the genre: on the one hand the danger that the storyteller can fall into an individualistic, self-centered presentation, and on the other hand the huge potential for creating an authentic narrative due to the workshop, the ideology of sharing and the interpretations that are made within the community" ("Autobiography and Authenticity" 120).


I found this essay very interesting, in that it claims a form of self-expression to be a genre. I think of blogging and people who prefer to maintain a daily journal in cyberspace for the public to see, as opposed to the privacy of a pen and paper journal that can be kept hidden until the author chooses to reveal it to someone - and even then, the amount of readers a pen and paper journal can garner is limited, depending on how many people the author chooses to share his or her life with. But with online blogging, I suppose you can also limit viewership, what with passwords being issued.

Autobiographies are being written each day, with each journal entry. It is never-ending. A person's autobiography stretches until one passes away, at which point there will be no more physical activities, musings, or even emotional vulnerability to be recorded. Because of this, I wonder if one can claim that the autobiography is its own separate genre. Genres are general labels for a pool of ideas from which each person can borrow and add on to. But autobiographies are very personal. While people might face the same, or similar, circumstances, each person's outlook and reaction to every circumstance varies. One cannot borrow another person's circumstance. One also cannot add on to, or change, a person's reaction - outward and inward - to a certain circumstance.

According to the quote I typed from page 120, authenticity lies in being able to share in each other's circumstances and life-happenings. But to say strictly that autobiographical accounts are only for the sake of imparting some sort of advice to the public is to disregard those experiences and events that people would rather keep to themselves. As was mentioned in the quote, some of the teenagers who partook in the study found that there was a boundary between sharing something personal and sharing something extremely personal that it would elicit a sense of discomfort. We cannot say that authenticity to the narrative is completely reliant on how well people are able to sympathize or relate with one's experiences in life. Perhaps people's lives are lived to be shared with others, but not every aspect is meant to be unraveled before the public for the world to see. Authenticity is not how anyone is able to relate to one's life story - or even how it contributes to the community. Authenticity is having one's own experiences and sharing them in ways that shed light into the uniqueness of one's particular experience, while not disregarding the similarity of other people's experiences.