The personal stories detailed by autobiographies, biographies and memoirs play an integral role in shaping identity and memories, painting vivid pictures of the human experience, but these pictures can quickly become too vivid, violating privacy.
On Tuesday evening, roughly 30 students, faculty, staff and Greencastle community members gathered to hear John Eakin’s reflections on life writing in his talk, “Telling Life Stories: The Good of It, and the Harm.”
In the final installment of a speaker series at the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics on the ethics of life writing, Eakin, a professor at Indiana University and one of the foremost authorities on the autobiography and memoir, addressed the complexities of the genre.
“When I first began writing autobiography, I had the predisposition to think that it was good,” Eakin said. “I also thought that it was a good thing for those who wrote it because I think that it assists, it forwards what I think of as a process of life long identity formation. It can promote our understanding our understanding of who we have been and who we become.”
Yet as Eakin’s career progressed and he began to examine the ethics behind life writing, he realized the duality of the genre. Through the examination of other’s biographies and his own experiences with life writing, Eakin explored the potential harm caused by publicizing personal moments, while also considering the potential value that can arise out of this type of writing.
Eakin explored the controversies sparked by past autobiographies and memoirs, such as Kathryn Harrison’s confessional memoir “The Kiss,” about her affair with her father during her college years. Harrison’s brutally honest and personal accounts spurred reactions of praise and disgust from the media.
“A good bit of other people thought that it [“The Kiss”] was symptomatic of culture which people were talking too much about private material about that deserved to be kept private,” Eakin said. “One reviewer in The Wall Street Journal said ‘hush up.’ The question turned less on violating the incest taboo to violating privacy. Was she merchandising pain?”
This memoir as one of the initial sparked several questions in the discussion of the ethics of life writing, such as the right to privacy and the underlying issues of respect for the persons depicted in biographical writing.
“Complicating my thinking about this question was my belief that our identities are relational, that is my sense of my self as an individual is a function in no small part in my understanding of my relationships to other people, particularly the near and dear siblings and friends,” Eakin said. “So if that’s the case, if our identities are relational and hence our privacies are shared, where does one life end and another begin?”
As Eakin examined the role of ethics and privacy in the genre of life writing, he began to contemplate the threats posed by social media to privacy, as life stories are oversimplified and overly publicized.
“Everyone is talking about themselves online, so what does this spell for the practice of self-representation?” Eakin said. “New kinds of self are emerging as a result, there the trouble of the erasure of personhood that results from the mismatch they see between who we are as persons and what information technology is capable of saying we are.”
While the ethical complexities of life writing may bog down the genre, Eakin pointed out its intrinsic value as a facilitator in the process of self-discovery and identity formation. Eakin’s personal experiences in writing his autobiography pushed him to unearth his personal story, particularly the struggles rooted in his relationship with his father.
“I can suggest three reasons why we engage in life writing. We are trained to do it, it answers a metaphysical need to know our place in the larger scheme of things, and self-narration promotes the well-being of the organisms that we are,” Eakin said.
Students were intrigued by Eakin’s insights into the dual nature of life writing. Nicki Hewell, a staff member at Prindle, was particularly intrigued by Eakin’s discussion of the role of social media in life writing.
“I think the most interesting part to me was the 1.0 and 2.0 distinction of the person, in real life versus the media world and what this means for our person,” Hewell said.
Eakins did not view the process of life writing as a static process, but rather a step towards preparing for the future, as people must “accept rather than disavow the lives that they’ve lived.”
“I would say what struck me the most, is his relationship with his family and reflecting in general,” said sophomore Zach Crenshaw, a communications major. “I like what he said about how memoir writing and autobiographies speak to the future as well as the past.”