If you were writing your autobiography, what would it say?

Assume you’re a writer who can involve an audience – a rara avis! – what effect would you aim for? Victor or victim? Winner or loser? Modest or proud? Satisfied or disappointed? Angry or glad? Comedy, tragedy, melodrama? Would we cheer the tale’s protagonist? What would we make of his loved ones, colleagues, foes? Would a reader set down your book with a smile or sigh?

Have you thought about it? Do you care? Will the portrait, like Dorian Gray’s, have altered over time? Would you paint the inner or outer you? Does such self-depiction tempt or terrify?

Questions swarm. Would your book be long or short? Its tone jaunty or bleak? Its lexicon highbrow or low? What reader would you be writing to? From an infinitude of memories, which would you include? Why?

Knowing I scribble, many an acquaintance has confided an intention to write their life, expecting encouragement. “Must you?” I discourteously sigh. Shelves sag with boastful accounts that inadvertently embarrass their composers. A self-portrait reveals more about us than we realize. Our every choice spills the beans about who we are – and those beans may be less tasty than we intend.

Many painters have painted themselves. Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, and Picasso spring to mind, but most, I suspect, have tried it, the price for a model is right. Durer painted himself, gorgeous at age 28, in the attitude of Christ. Encountering his big face in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, I recoiled as if slugged. Vanity or humility? Heresy or hallelujah? I’d return to Munich if only to gaze at it again (and have it gaze into me). Michelangelo, I’m convinced, was creating a spiritualized self-portrait in his heroic males – in person he wasn’t so glam – and then, in his Last Judgment, an excruciating self-indictment before a glowering Christ.

I’ve commenced on at least a dozen autobiographies during my consciousness only to falter en route. My life’s story enthralls me – only I don’t know what it is. The arc of my history changes with the day, circumstances, slant of light. This attempt to perceive myself has educated me, but what’s the moral of my tale? All the questions arrayed above I can answer in the affirmative. The more I know, the less.

The concept of an autobiography is predicated on secure self-knowledge: here’s who I was. Yet such confidence demonstrates stupidity. While the oracle at Delphi urged petitioners to “Know Thyself,” did any believe that practicable? I know this and that about myself, little truths, but these are shards from a shattered vase, impossible to reconstruct.

Humans differ widely about their desire to tell their tale. Jane is often urged to share the story of her storied career. She writes beautifully, she could make a fine book, but she has no interest. What story, she wants to know. My zeal to depict myself is fierce and endless. I often repeat with Shakespeare’s Richard II (and his creator, another incorrigible self-portraitist), “Thus play I in one person many people, and none contented.”

Admiration is not what drives any plausible autobiographer. If your results delight, you haven’t aimed high enough or encountered your insignificance. Rembrandt portrayed himself almost a hundred times, enthralled by the mystery of his being. Existence makes no sense if you look hard. That face in the mirror is the most mysterious. “I should not talk so much about myself,” wrote Thoreau, “if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”

My story resists the telling, bless it. That should keep me busy till dark.