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possesses a peculiar kind of truth through narrative composed of the author’s metaphors of self that attempt to reconcile the individual events of a lifetime by using a combination of memory and imagination . . . all . . . rooted in what really happened, and judged both by the standards of truth and falsity and by the standards of success as an artistic creation. (3)

Among the different authors he analyses, he devotes entire chapters to discussing southerners like Lillian Hellman and Richard Wright as examples of authors who were accused of lying in their memoirs. The creative dimension of memory and its fictive component in self-constructions are the main focus of James Olney’s Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (1998). He also includes Richard Wright in Chapter Three.

Studies on autobiography including gender issues appeared in the 1980s. Mary G. Mason’s essay “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers” in James Olney’s Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (1980) is the only one in the entire volume that discusses women’s contribution to the autobiographical genre. Her work, however, paved the way for lengthier studies in subsequent years. Early attempts to establish a distinct female tradition of autobiography can be seen, for example, in Estelle Jelinek’s The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography (1986), in which she undertakes a historical overview of women’s autobiography in England and America and includes Lillian Hellman as part of that female tradition she views as “different” (13) from the male one. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenk’s volume Lifelines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography (1988) constitutes also an attempt to introduce women’s autobiographical texts into the canon, whereas Sidonie Smith’s A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (1987) places emphasis on the presence of fiction in women’s autobiographies. Carolyn Heilbrun also defines her popular volume Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) as a “feminist undertaking” (18) that deliberately seeks to be non-theoretical to reach wider audiences.