Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'
Interpretation
Fiction and autobiography serve different purposes, with fiction allowing a deeper immersion into the character's experience.
In this quote, Kate Atkinson distinguishes between writing fiction and autobiography, emphasizing that while both may utilize the first-person narrative, their purposes and subjective experiences differ significantly. Fictional narratives allow the author to fully inhabit a character's experiences, emotions, and thoughts, creating a more intimate relationship with the reader, whereas autobiography reflects the author's own life and personal truths, which inherently involves different dynamics of self-expression and representation.
In practice
In a writing workshop discussing the differences in narrative techniques.
Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.
Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?
The moment always dictates in my work. What I feel, I do. This is the most important thing for me. Everybody can look, but they don't necessarily see. I never calculate or consider; I see a situation and I know that it's right, even if I have to go back to get the proper lighting.
In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.
A sky as pure as water bathed the stars and brought them out.
They swayed about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus.
The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.
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