Autobiographical novel examples

Autobiographical novel pdf
Autobiography book
Autobiographical novel characteristics

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Sal Paradise, a stand-in for Kerouac, travels across 1950s America with his best friend Dean (stand-in for Neal Cassady), crashing on couches, taking drugs, and doing the whole Beat Generation Thing. The novel is based entirely on notebooks Kerouac kept during his real-life travels with his friends, and features a disguised Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. The novel was famously first written on a single scroll of paper 120 feet long, with no paragraph breaks, and would go on to be regarded as the defining text of a generation.

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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

In this beloved YA novel that author Alexie has stated is “about seventy-eight percent true“, we follow Junior, a Native American boy growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, as he leaves the reservation’s high school and atte

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How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Praise for How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Alexander Chee explores the realm of the real with extraordinarily beautiful essays. Being real here is an ambition, a haunting, an impossibility, and an illusion. What passes for real, his essays suggest, becomes real, just as life becomes art and art, pursued this fully, becomes a life.” —Eula Biss

“These essays feel like a life's wisdom, salvaged from a great fire. I feel in possession of a map of secrets and second chances, holding an inheritance whose gifts have only been partially revealed to me. But these essays are more than maps; for me, as a younger writer, they are the very ground, the earth made solid enough so that I might stand here, made rich enough so that I might plant here, and, thrive here. This book makes me feel possible.” —Ocean Vuong

“I'm astonished by the wisdom of these essays, and how beautiful they are. A riveting account of activism and artistry, as well as a profound exploration of the intersections of identities and experiences that build up this novelis

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Today’s guest post is by ghostwriter Barry Fox.

It’s a common problem. You’re eagerly writing the story of your life from beginning to end when suddenly you get to that jerk you’d love to omit—you know, the ex-spouse from hell, maybe the sibling you haven’t spoken to in decades, or some other diabolical character.

You don’t even want to think about this loser, let alone write about him. Why open old wounds? Or you might worry that if you tell the truth about him you’ll hurt others, or maybe get slapped with a lawsuit.

Then there are the embarrassing “What was I thinking?!” moments in your life that you’d like to scrub from your story. Or maybe your life is somewhat convoluted and hard to follow; too many people, places, events, and other things to cover. You’d like to simplify things to make it an easier, more interesting read.

As a ghostwriter, I’ve been faced with this problem more than once. One of my clients requested just “a little adjustment” in her autobiography—meaning she wanted to leave out husbands number two and three. Another client, a man who’d had a leng