"True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale"
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Brodkey is quietly sabotaging the comforting idea that an autobiography starts where memory does. He opens the frame until the edges disappear: a "true story" doesn’t begin with a first scene, or even a first breath, but in the accumulated weather of family, history, class, and damage that predates the narrator. It’s an almost perversely expansive claim, and it’s also a defense of his signature method: the long, spiraling sentence that treats consciousness as an archive you can never fully index.
The sly move is pairing "true stories" with "like some novels". Brodkey collapses the supposed moral hierarchy between fact and fiction. Truth, he implies, isn’t a matter of verification but of causation: what made this person, what pressures shaped their choices, what unseen inheritance sits inside each gesture. That’s the subtext of "before the acts in the account" - the drama isn’t the deed; it’s the precondition. An autobiography that begins at the action is already lying by omission, laundering origins into plot.
Context matters here. Brodkey wrote in an era when confessional writing and the autobiographical novel were both prestige forms and battlegrounds, and his own work was obsessed with childhood, illness, desire, and the tyranny of family narrative. The line reads like a manifesto against the tidy arc: if you want a life to make sense, you have to admit how much of it was written for you before you ever got a pen.
The sly move is pairing "true stories" with "like some novels". Brodkey collapses the supposed moral hierarchy between fact and fiction. Truth, he implies, isn’t a matter of verification but of causation: what made this person, what pressures shaped their choices, what unseen inheritance sits inside each gesture. That’s the subtext of "before the acts in the account" - the drama isn’t the deed; it’s the precondition. An autobiography that begins at the action is already lying by omission, laundering origins into plot.
Context matters here. Brodkey wrote in an era when confessional writing and the autobiographical novel were both prestige forms and battlegrounds, and his own work was obsessed with childhood, illness, desire, and the tyranny of family narrative. The line reads like a manifesto against the tidy arc: if you want a life to make sense, you have to admit how much of it was written for you before you ever got a pen.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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