My Factless Autobiography

 I envy - but I'm not sure that I envy - those for whom a biography could be written, or who could write their own. In these ransom impressions, and with no desire to e other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I saw nothing, it's because I have nothing to say.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 12

Since I referenced Pessoa's notion of a "factless autobiography" in the previous post I figured I go ahead and include the original passage. I don't read many biographies or autobiographies, but one of the reasons why I think they sometimes fail is that they include way too much information. Recently I read three massive biographies of Marcus Aurelius, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa. I was not not sold on the first two, whereas I thought the Pessoa one (Richard Zenith's) was extraordinary. One of the reasons why Zenith's was so good was that I think it, while providing outside events and movements as context, it didn't get lost in them, which allowed the reader to truly immerse themselves into Pessoa as a writer and thinker. The others were almost too crowded with events, whereas Pessoa's, partially because while he led a busy life he didn't go far beyond the outskirts of Lisbon itself, we could get more into his inner life. In the same way, one of the reasons why The Book of Disquiet works as an autobiography of a sorts for Pessoa is that it is told through the heteronym (of in the case of Soares a partial heteronym) so the facts, like trees, don't block out the sun.