As-told-to life writing: a topic for scholarship

ABSTRACT

As-told-to life writing is defined as the written account of a subject’s life produced by a writer, on the basis of an oral account produced by the subject, over the course of a series of interviews. Although it is increasingly widely practised, its theoretical, practical and ethical challenges attract little scholarly attention. Three obstacles stand in the way of scholarship: the lack of a universally agreed upon name for this kind of life writing; the focus by literary scholars on its autobiographical aspects at the expense of its biographical aspects; and the inability of existing theoretical models to accommodate the complete range of as-told-to life writing forms. This article is both a critique and an extension of the work of Philippe Lejeune and G. Thomas Couser. Models originally constructed by Couser, building on the work of Lejeune, are modified and expanded to accommodate as-told-to life writing as both genre and practice. Particular attention is drawn to the nuanced nature of authority and its corollary, vulnerability, at different levels and different stages of the as-told-to life writing process. The aim of the article is to unpack the full and largely unrealised potential of as-told-to life writing as a topic for scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• As-told-to life writing
• collaborative life writing
• autobiography
• biography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sandra Lindemann is a freelance writer and an accredited editor with the Institute of Professional Editors. She has been engaged in the practice of as-told-to life writing for the past 15 years, during which time she has written five biographies and two interview-based community histories. Sandra holds Honours and Masters degrees in Anthropology, an Advanced Diploma in Professional Writing, and a PhD in English. Research for her PhD thesis took the form of an ethnographic study of the work culture of writers engaged in the production of as-told-to life writing.