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In Reading Autobiography, Smith and Watson argue that, as readers of autobiography, we need to “attend to the role of remembering—and conscious forgetting—in the act of making meaning out of the past and the present” (30). We also need to draw on Joan Scott’s foundational essay “The Evidence of Experience” to understand that “it is not individuals who have experience but subjects who are constituted through experience” (779). As Smith and Watson summarize Scott’s point, experience is “the very process through which a person becomes a certain kind of subject owning certain identities in the social realm, identities constituted through material, cultural, economic, and psychic relations” (30-31). Patterns of experience result in patterns of subjectivity—they are private productions of little scripts, as Lillian Smith wrote, deploying that helpful dramaturgical metaphor that Kevin Gaines also used.

Historians tend to be most interested in the patterns, the scripts—that is, in the social and cultural more than the individual level. Nevertheless, there is something to be gained by exploring the nature of subjectivity. In Touching the World, critic Paul John Eakin posits that autobiography is never simply mimetic, but attempts to transform the past, involving “a simultaneous acceptance and refusal of the constraints of the real” (46, 180). Attuned to individual psychology, Jennifer Fleischner expands on Eakin’s insight in Mastering Slavery: Women, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives. She argues that autobiographers not only find themselves, but create themselves in writing and that they do so with a greater self-awareness than readers often recognize. Even those authors most committed to telling “the truth” comprehend, at some level, that they can tell the truth only as they saw it and as they have come to understand it. Indeed, for many, the autobiographical impulse derives from a feeling that they have achieved a mature viewpoint on past events. Thus, to write an autobiography is, as Fleischner puts it, “to act on the desire to repeat one’s past in order to ‘supplement’ it, because the past is and was ‘never acceptable’” (20).