"I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974"
About this Quote
Weaponized amnesia has rarely sounded so polite. Jeffrey Bernard’s line is a deadpan SOS disguised as a professional request: he’s been hired to produce the respectable, linear narrative an “autobiography” promises, and he’s already confessing that his own life won’t cooperate. The joke lands because it treats the most personal genre in publishing as a clerical task with missing receipts. If memory is supposed to be the author’s one unfair advantage, Bernard flips it into a crowd-sourcing problem.
The subtext is less “I don’t remember” than “the version you want doesn’t exist.” The years 1960 to 1974 aren’t random; they’re prime adulthood, the span a conventional life story would turn into career-making chapters. By blanking them out, Bernard implies excess, chaos, and a certain chemically assisted blur. He doesn’t moralize or perform recovery. He turns self-knowledge into satire: the author as unreliable narrator not because he’s lying, but because he’s been living in a way that makes truth hard to file.
Context matters: Bernard, a hard-drinking Fleet Street fixture who made confession into a kind of entertainment, is also needling the memoir industry’s hunger for neat arcs and marketable suffering. The line punctures the piety of self-documentation. It invites readers to become witnesses, accomplices, maybe even co-authors - suggesting that a public life, especially one lived in bars and columns, belongs partly to the crowd that watched it unravel.
It’s funny because it’s bleak, and it’s bleak because it’s honest about how identity gets written: not from pristine recollection, but from the stories other people can still stand to tell about you.
The subtext is less “I don’t remember” than “the version you want doesn’t exist.” The years 1960 to 1974 aren’t random; they’re prime adulthood, the span a conventional life story would turn into career-making chapters. By blanking them out, Bernard implies excess, chaos, and a certain chemically assisted blur. He doesn’t moralize or perform recovery. He turns self-knowledge into satire: the author as unreliable narrator not because he’s lying, but because he’s been living in a way that makes truth hard to file.
Context matters: Bernard, a hard-drinking Fleet Street fixture who made confession into a kind of entertainment, is also needling the memoir industry’s hunger for neat arcs and marketable suffering. The line punctures the piety of self-documentation. It invites readers to become witnesses, accomplices, maybe even co-authors - suggesting that a public life, especially one lived in bars and columns, belongs partly to the crowd that watched it unravel.
It’s funny because it’s bleak, and it’s bleak because it’s honest about how identity gets written: not from pristine recollection, but from the stories other people can still stand to tell about you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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