Unless you are another Marcel Proust or Vladimir Nabokov, you cannot retrieve the past.  I suspect even those two gentlemen are not really Proust or Nabokov.   It doesn’t matter because autobiography is not an exercise in retrieval but in reconstruction. Autobiography is not written analogue of photography but is a self-portrait.   In this corner, one puts a splash of humor, over there a bit of very vivid color, elsewhere there are wild, broad strokes of hyperbole, and so forth.

The self-portrait need not be unrelieved, egotistical self-flattery; indeed that will turn the reader away.  It can have a good dose of self-loathing but, if done excessively, makes the protagonist into an antagonist for whom the reader can feel no sympathy.

An autobiography cannot be ghostwritten for it is always he who puts the words to paper who has the last word.  It cannot be “as told to” for that reduces the “autobiography” to being a source.  No student who consults encyclopedias for his term paper lists the encyclopedia as anything else but one of his sources.   An “as told to” book reduces the presumptive author to a source.   Thus, political “autobiographies” are not autobiographies.   Moreover, political autobiographies usually fail to show an inner life.  The writer is writing a “memoir” – an account of how he or she has participated in the great events he hopes the reader wants to learn about.    For the political memoirist, events, not his life, are what matter.

Contrary to the inane advice, literary agents give would-be authors, autobiography should not aim to reveal universal themes but to present the author in the singularity of his life.   The autobiographer is not a diarist, drearily recording the daily events of his life, and, because the autobiography is much more than first person biography, the author may permit himself a considerable degree of subjectivity.  The diarist has no use for that and the biographer must avoid that.

The biographer is writing, perforce, about the past, but the past is dead and over with, (even if the subject is still alive), whereas the autobiographer is never dead (although his work is sometimes issued posthumously)and he can enliven his work by extending all he has to say, not only up to the very moment he is putting dark ink on white paper but even into the not too-remote future.

Biography is a literary genre, and good biographers may make a career of it.  Autobiography is not a literary genre, at least not from the internal point of view, no matter where the librarian places those books.  Meaningful autobiography is a final summing up and that is why it is absurd when superstar athletes release their “autobiographies” when they are 23 years old.  The road lies ahead and there are miles to go, and there are miles to go.