Life & Wisdom Quote by John Grigg

Autobiography, in John Grigg's hands, isn’t a dignified literary genre so much as a minor vice that’s gone mass-market. The line lands because it treats self-revelation the way polite society once treated infidelity: widespread, whispered about, and performed with a curious mixture of shame and swagger. “Now” does the heavy lifting. It implies a cultural slide from restraint to exhibition, as if modernity didn’t just loosen sexual morals but also eroded the old reluctance to put one’s ego on public display.

Grigg’s joke is structured like a courtroom charge: commonness is not a defense, and popularity is almost evidence of guilt. That’s the subtext aimed at the mid-to-late 20th century’s expanding celebrity machinery and publishing economy, where the private self becomes a commodity and confession becomes a career move. Autobiography, ideally, promises candor; Grigg hints it more often delivers self-justification, score-settling, and brand management. The “hardly less reprehensible” sting suggests that the real betrayal isn’t of a spouse but of privacy, discretion, and perhaps truth itself.

As a writer and critic steeped in establishment skepticism, Grigg is also poking at the democratization of authorship: everyone has a “story,” and the market encourages them to sell it. The irony is that autobiography markets authenticity while incentivizing performance. Like adultery, it’s framed as both commonplace and corrosive, a behavior whose normalization doesn’t make it healthier, just easier to excuse.