"All autobiography is self-indulgent"
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Calling autobiography self-indulgent, Daphne du Maurier names both a flaw and a necessity of the genre. To write a life is to linger on the self, to arrange memory so that it flatters, explains, or absolves. Even the most scrupulous narrator must select, heighten, and omit. That shaping is an act of self-interest, a kind of staging that invites the charge of indulgence. Yet du Maurier was not merely sneering at memoirists; she was exposing the paradox that a truthful account of the self may require precisely the focus that looks like vanity.
Her own career sharpens the point. Famously private and skeptical of publicity, she let fiction do the speaking: the haunted spaces of Cornwall, the controlled suspense of Rebecca, the way identity dissolves into atmosphere. When she finally produced a life story, Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer, she narrowed it to her early years, anchored it in diaries, and framed it as the apprenticeship of an artist. Even then, the emphasis falls on landscapes, reading, and craft rather than confession. The restraint reads like a preemptive answer to her own accusation. If all autobiography tends toward self-indulgence, then the task is to discipline that tendency into art.
The line also hints at a deeper anxiety about ownership of narrative. Memory is unreliable; suggestion is seductive. A writer can easily turn the self into a sympathetic protagonist and the past into a moral arc that justifies everything. Du Maurier understood how story seduces, how houses and lovers and storms become mirrors. Her warning presses toward an ethical standard: interrogate motive, distrust convenience, let the prose serve the reader as much as the ego.
There is a wry humility here. All autobiography indulges the self, but not all indulgence is discrediting. The question is whether the inward gaze becomes a mirror that flatters or a lens that clarifies.
Her own career sharpens the point. Famously private and skeptical of publicity, she let fiction do the speaking: the haunted spaces of Cornwall, the controlled suspense of Rebecca, the way identity dissolves into atmosphere. When she finally produced a life story, Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer, she narrowed it to her early years, anchored it in diaries, and framed it as the apprenticeship of an artist. Even then, the emphasis falls on landscapes, reading, and craft rather than confession. The restraint reads like a preemptive answer to her own accusation. If all autobiography tends toward self-indulgence, then the task is to discipline that tendency into art.
The line also hints at a deeper anxiety about ownership of narrative. Memory is unreliable; suggestion is seductive. A writer can easily turn the self into a sympathetic protagonist and the past into a moral arc that justifies everything. Du Maurier understood how story seduces, how houses and lovers and storms become mirrors. Her warning presses toward an ethical standard: interrogate motive, distrust convenience, let the prose serve the reader as much as the ego.
There is a wry humility here. All autobiography indulges the self, but not all indulgence is discrediting. The question is whether the inward gaze becomes a mirror that flatters or a lens that clarifies.
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| Topic | Writing |
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