Speaking of self-documentation, how many words would you need to tell your life story? The longest autobiography my cursory search turned up is My Secret Life, by Anonymous. He filled 2,359 pages with details of his amorous conquests. "It could have been written by a computer fed to repletion by a sex-crazed programmer," wrote Time Magazine's reviewer in 1966.
In the brevity-is-the-soul-of-wit camp sits a new book, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.
A few samples:
After Harvard, had baby with crackhead.
- Robin Templeton
70 years, few tears, hairy ears.
- Bill Querengesser
Watching quietly from every door frame.
- Nicole Resseguie
Savior complex makes for many disappointments.
- Alanna Schubach
Boiling down one's life is an interesting exercise: Would you focus on a plot twist that shaped you, on a theme that's surfaced again and again across diverse circumstances, or on the defining aspects of your character? Getting yourself "right" in six words is probably much harder than penning a 61-pound memoir like Anonymous (Had many lovers. Wrote about them.)
